Marshall Islands firefighters try to contain the fire.
Photo by Chewy Lin/RNZ Pacific
MAJURO (RNZ Pacific/Pacnews) — Fire engulfed Marshall Islands Nitijela (parliament building) just after midnight on Monday, with firefighters risking their lives as they battled the blaze into early Tuesday morning to save the complex.
“Sometime around midnight or shortly after this morning, the parliament building in Majuro caught on fire, started burning,” RNZ Pacific’s correspondent in the Marshall Islands Giff Johnson said.
“The fire department here is pretty nonexistent, except for an airport firefighting team, which was called in, but they weren’t able to get there for over an hour.”
Johnson said the building was completely engulfed by the time the fire truck arrived on site.
He said the parliament chamber and offices, the library and all the archives, “have been all destroyed.”
“Everything’s wiped out. All the records are gone,” he said.
“A lot of the structure, which is concrete, is still standing, but it’s now noontime (Tuesday), and it’s still smoking. Firefighters are still on site, trying to quell it.
“The building is no longer usable, and already, alternative plans are being talked about, about where they’re going to hold parliament, because parliament is actually in session right now.
“Fortunately, the fire started late overnight so no indication that anybody was harmed.”
Johnson said the Marshall Islands does not have much capacity in firefighting and fire inspection processes, making it difficult to determine the cause of the fire.
He said many entities in the Marshall Islands do not have backups, and it could take people weeks to figure out what they have lost and what they can still access.
“From purely a records point of view, and just getting their system back up and running, it’s going to be a while because everything has been digitized at the parliament, and it’s a really complicated situation.”
The Marshall Islands Cabinet was having an emergency meeting and was expected to make a statement later Tuesday.