The Star 3 bar on Pho Duc Chinh Street in Ba Dinh District has two stories and spreads over an area of 300 sq.m. The fire started on the second floor at 6:30 p.m. and spread down to the first and to the adjacent restaurant.
The bar is popular and usually very crowded, but it was temporarily closed for renovations and so there were no customers at the time of the blaze.
Filled with air conditioning and audio-visual equipment, it burned fiercely once the fire started. Columns of smoke and fire rose dozens of meters, and were accompanied by numerous explosions. Video by Trang Ma
Around 15 fire trucks were dispatched to the scene and lined up along Pho Duc Chinh Street.
The firefighters approached the fire from multiple directions. One team sprayed water from the front and sides, another used a ladder truck to direct water into the center of the fire from above, and a third, equipped with gas masks and fire-resistant suits, entered the bar to try and extinguish the fire from within.
By 9:00 p.m. two firefighters were injured and evacuated, one with a leg injury and the other suffering from smoke inhalation.
Three ambulances with 10 medical personnel were standing by at the scene.
Around 100 firefighters, civil defense personnel and local police officers were involved in the firefight.
The two-story bar, built with concrete columns and steel frames, was surrounded by soundproof walls made of bricks, foam, rubber, and wood.
To direct water at the blaze, the wall at the front was torn down.
At 10:30 p.m. the equipment inside the bar was still smoldering. The police had to keep rotating teams to keep the water hoses going.
Excavators were used to knock over soundproof walls and remove the steel frame so that the hoses could reach deep into the bar.
After the fire blazed for over four hours, the roof collapsed, and all audio-visual equipment and air conditioning systems were destroyed.
At 11:45 p.m. the authorities used spotlights and kept spraying water to reduce the temperature of the building’s steel frame to prevent the fire from rekindling.
