A large fire burned down a building in central Pyongyang earlier this month, leaving a pile of ashes near the never-completed Ryugyong Hotel and the Korean War Museum.

The incident took place on the northern bank of the Potong River encircling the central part of the North Korean capital, with low-resolution satellite imagery from Planet Labs showing a tall column of smoke rising from what appears to be a small factory or warehouse at 11:50 a.m. KST on Nov. 2, NK News confirmed.

NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS), which uses temperature data from satellites to identify hot spots, detected the blaze at 10:34 a.m. that day, indicating the flame likely raged for some time before being extinguished.

The extent of the damage and casualties are hard to assess given Pyongyang’s lack of reporting on the fire, although low- and high-resolution images from Nov. 3-4 clearly show full destruction of the building, with the burned beams covered in charcoal laying exposed on the ground.

SI-Analytics was first to identify the fire, releasing high-resolution satellite imagery of the burning building and the fire’s aftermath. It suggested that the incident involved a small factory “handling large quantities of flammable materials.”

Jacob Bogle, a North Korea geospatial analyst, generally agreed with the assessment. He said that “it was almost certainly a small warehouse or factory” and not a garage or “government agency building,” although he cautioned that it is hard to ascertain its purpose.

“My guess is that it was an accident related to normal operations such as a random spark, maybe a chemical container caught fire,” he told NK News.

The expert pointed out that the site used to host a single long factory until 2013, when a separate unit for the now-damaged building was carved out. A neighboring gray building of unknown purpose was erected next to it from 2015-2023.

Pyongyang, home to several million people, is prone to fires like any other large city, with their occurrence often caught by geospatial services like NASA. Experts have repeatedly voiced concerns about North Korea’s low preparedness for fires, especially in the countryside in dry seasons like winter and spring.

Given the localized nature of the fire in available satellite imagery, it appears that city services managed to contain the blaze despite failing to save the building.

Edited by Bryan Betts