Lives could've been lost in island chalet fire

We are travelers from America and we are writing to you about the Lily Chalet fire on Oct 30, at 11am at the Kecil Island, Perhentian Islands.

My fellow traveler, Laura Brzozowski, and I were guests at the hotel, Bungalow 12, and lost a number of personal items in the blaze. I witnessed the fire from start to finish and was able to retrieve our passports and some of our things before our cabin caught fire too.

It took 20 minutes from the start of the fire before any of the hotel staff took any action to relocate explosive propane tanks from the nearby kitchen. There was no procedure, no alarm, and no fire extinguishers on the property and the fire caught and burned rapidly.

I observed that there was no haste from hotel staff in controlling the fire when the first bungalow caught fire (Number 11), nor in warning or in helping the guests.

The hotel was scheduled to close with it being the end of the high season and the start of monsoon. The chalets were just about full and nearly everyone we spoke to had already payed for that night's stay with nothing in the way of assistance or refund from the management (he swore at us when we asked for our money back).

When we gave our report to the police, they were talking about the hotel only being five percent full so there was only ‘minimal danger’. We are certain that this statement is untrue as most of the cabins - if not all - were occupied.

The night before the fire we observed a series of short power outages due apparently to the switching on of a generator. Guests in Bungalow 12A reported a camera battery melting in their cabin at 10:30am half-an-hour before the fire.

We feel that the facility was unsafe and if a fire of that nature had started in the night, the safety and even the lives of the guests would have been seriously compromised.

We hope that no one else is put in this type of danger and hope that further investigations result in safer accommodations in the future.