Bangkok’s bar fire is the city’s latest deadly blaze – will anything ever change?

A sudden blast of flame across a crowded bar sends revellers in panic towards a single, narrow exit. Thick, toxic smoke chokes them. The bodies of those who have succumbed block the escape of those who have not.

These horrific scenes occurred not only at the Rong Beer Na Ladprao pub in Bangkok last Sunday night, where 32 people are now known to have died, but also in another night club called Mountain B four years ago in the coastal town of Sattahip.

Twenty six people died in that inferno, which bears a striking similarity to the recent one in Bangkok.

Both these fires are similar to one at a new year celebration in the Santika Club in Bangkok in 2009 which killed 67. After each of these tragedies there were calls for lessons to be learned to prevent them happening again.

One of those, after the Mountain B fire, was made by Worsak Kanok-Nukulchai from the Asian Institute of Technology. Now he finds himself repeating the same warnings.

“Even though the fire from these three incidents occurred in different locations, at different times and might have different causes, the pattern was very similar: multiple deaths in a crowded building, the fire spreading rapidly either in the stage area or in the ceiling, thick smoke cutting visibility and preventing people from finding the exits, and people dying from toxic inhalation, not directly from the fire.”

He believes the fire may have been ignited by an electrical fault, and spread through flammable material used for sound insulation.

The terrifying jets of flame seen roaring out into the street through the front entrance were most likely being drawn out by new sources of oxygen once it was opened to let people out.

That intense fire around the entrance may have forced some customers to head to the rear of the pub, where the two exits are reported to have been partially blocked, and would have been difficult to find once the power was cut.

Many of the dead were found there.