A fire has destroyed the parliament of Marshall Islands despite attempts by firefighters to save the building.<\/p>\n
Fire crews arrived in the early hours of Tuesday morning and began an hours-long effort to stop the blaze after receiving a distress call at midnight.<\/p>\n
However, witnesses in the Pacific Island nation’s capital, Majuro, said the building burnt down and reported seeing its remains smouldering this morning.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Emergency services tried to save the building after arriving at 1am. (Supplied: Chewy Lin)<\/p>\n
A Marshall Islands government spokesperson said there were early signs the fire originated from a container trailer adjacent to the building.<\/p>\n
“At the time of this report, responders are actively preventing further damage on the capitol grounds,” the spokesperson said in a written statement.<\/p>\n
The fire struck during a parliamentary sitting period, and as government officials met regularly to finalise the next budget.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The fire struck during a parliamentary sitting period for the Pacific Island nation. (Supplied: Chewy Lin)<\/p>\n
Former Marshall Islands health secretary Jack Niedenthal told the ABC the fire had left people in shock.<\/p>\n
“It’s all taken us by complete surprise this morning,” he said.<\/p>\n
“It’s devastating, absolutely devastating for the government here.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Witnesses say the building has been “gutted” by the blaze. (Supplied: Chewy Lin)<\/p>\n
Mr Niedenthal said he saw the remains of the building smouldering this morning.<\/p>\n
“The smoke is still there. Lots of people are trying to move things around in there.<\/p>\n
“It’s totalled \u2026 it still has a roof on it, but it’s been gutted.”<\/p>\n
The government spokesperson said the Marshall Islands Police Department’s fire truck was unable to respond due to “a critical equipment part being unavailable for maintenance”.<\/p>\n
Mr Niedenthal said local firefighters were under-resourced and not equipped to deal with large fires.<\/p>\n
“We have [a] couple of fire engines here and that’s it \u2026 we’re stretched thin in that department.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A fire has destroyed the parliament of Marshall Islands despite attempts by firefighters to save the building. Fire…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":96248,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,70826,44,70827,70825,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-96247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-marshall-islands","tag-news","tag-parliament-burnt-down","tag-parliament-fire","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96247\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/96248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}