81 Killed in Blaze at Thai Resort Hotel

A kitchen fire raced through a 17-story luxury hotel in this beach resort Friday, killing at least 81 people as guests found themselves trapped behind locked emergency exits.

Crowds on the sidewalk watched in horror as people screamed for help and waved towels from windows on the upper floors. One man jumped to his death from the 11th floor.

Police said 64 people were injured and that more bodies may be inside the 450-room Royal Jomtien Hotel in Pattaya, 70 miles south of Bangkok, the capital.

Many of the dead were found near emergency exits that had been chained shut to prevent guests from skipping out without paying, Interior Minister Snoh Thienthong said. The hotel had no sprinklers.

The fire began about 9 a.m. when a gas oven exploded in a first-floor coffee shop, killing eight kitchen workers. About 200 people were in the hotel at the time.

Leaking fumes quickly fed the flames into conference rooms where employees of Thailand’s electric authority and the local PepsiCo subsidiary were having seminars. The attendees were among those killed.

Flames spread to other floors, spewing clouds of black smoke as the families of the conference members and other guests tried to escape. Many suffocated in hallways or internal fire escapes.

Among those trapped on the top floors was Rochelle Stein-Sami of the United States, and her daughter. Stein-Sami and her daughter, still clutching her teddy bear, were rescued by a helicopter that landed on the roof.

Stein-Sami said there was no warning of any kind, not even smoke alarms.

Rescue workers carried out dozens of charred bodies. The hotel owner’s wife also died in the fire.

Police Maj. Gen. Kongbej Choosri, commander of the provincial police, criticized the lack of external fire exits, saying the internal escape stairs were deathtraps.

Pattaya’s outmoded fire equipment could not reach flames above the fourth floor, Kongbej said. Firetrucks equipped with hydraulic buckets had to be called in from Bangkok. Damage was estimated at $40 million.