The Macao Fire Brigade announced Saturday that the big fire occurred Friday night in the northern part of Macao did not cause explosions of oil gas cylinders stored nearby, and the intermittent explosions heard by local residents were caused by unknown incendive industrial liquid.

The brigade said that the nearest cylinder deposit was only 10 meters away from the fire when they arrived at the site at around 11:00 pm Friday, six minutes after they got the fire alarm. They successfully controlled the fire within 4,000 square meters of area in less than three hours. There was no losses in the oil gas warehouse, which is a transfer station housing storage owned by eight local petroleum companies.

Fire control officer Lei Pun Chi said that they did not find any casualty when putting out the fire, neither received any pleading for human salvation.

Lei told Xinhua that over 300 fire fighters and 28 fire wagons were drafted to extinguish the fire, the largest one in the Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) in the past 10 years. It is still hard to say whether a premeditated arson was involved, but the fire was ignited by lumber materials piled close to the incentive industrial liquid, which was suspected to be used for electric welding.

The accident site located in Iiha Verde District, where Macao borders Zhuhai City in south China's Guangdong Province by a narrow water line, is a privately-owned land asset. It has not registered for the brigade's regular fire-proof safety inspection, according to Lei.

He said that the district is generally known as a deposit center of Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG) for household use. The oil gas warehouse close to the fire site has a capacity of housing 80 tons of LPG. The fire control environment was complicated.

Police cordoned off the LPG deposit area, and evacuated residents living in 10 apartment buildings close to the area in the small hours Saturday. Xinhua's reporters saw burnt waste mingled with fire extinguishing foam still littering in the two large yards and several vehicles destroyed Saturday morning.

The brigade estimated that the fire did not caused big losses. In-depth investigations are still going on.

Senior officials with the transport secretariat of the SAR government, fire brigade and the public police force took command of extinguishing the fire, which helped protect the oil gas deposit, two gas stations and 10 residential buildings nearby with the nearest residential complex only some 130 meters away from the warehouse.

(Xinhua News Agency August 2, 2003)