Selangor disaster management committee chairman Najwan Halimi said the panel will review the completed investigation report on the blaze and table its recommendations to the state government’s executive council in two months.

Najwan said the purpose of forming this committee was to identify the cause of the incident, evaluate SOP compliance, and recommend improvements to prevent a repeat of the incident, Sinar Harian reported.

Khamarrul is a senior research fellow at the Disaster Preparedness and Prevention Center at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia’s Malaysia-Japan International Institute of Technology.

He has worked extensively on disaster risk reduction, and sits on international disaster-risk organisations such as the Global Young Academy.

The other members of the committee include Zahirasri Tohir of Universiti Putra Malaysia, Her Jantan of the Institution of Engineers Malaysia, Malaysian Institute of Planners vice-president Abdul Hamid Akub, and Shahronizam Noordin of the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health.

The others are Ikram Works Sdn Bhd director Taufik Haron, UGEO Solutions Sdn Bhd’s Juzaili Azmi, and Anuri Ghazali of Geo Mag Engineering.

The incident saw flames soaring over 30m high with temperatures reaching up to 1,000 degrees Celsius. There were no fatalities, but 150 victims had to seek treatment in hospitals.

It took firefighters nearly eight hours to extinguish the blaze, which left a 10m-deep crater, and destroyed 81 houses, with structural damage exceeding 40%. Another 81 houses were partially damaged, and 57 were affected but not burned.

Police had ruled out foul play, while a technical investigation determined that it was caused by parts of the gas line failing because the condition of the ground underneath was not strong enough to support the weight and pressure of the pipe.