The extended Johnson family of seven no longer has a place to call home after an early afternoon fire completely destroyed their two-storey house at Wisroc Housing Scheme, Wismar, Linden yesterday.
Owner of the house Esme Johnson occupied the upper flat with a granddaughter Oneeka Johnson and another person. The owner’s son Leonard Johnson, his wife Soyinka and their two children occupied the lower flat.
Shortly after noon, Esme Johnson said, she was in her shop at the front of the yard at 184 Wisroc when she received a call from a neighbour. “I didn’t even understand what he was saying but he sound so confused I run out the yard and start panicking,” she said. “Dey shout to me to look at the back and then is when I see the whole back of the house blazing with heavy fire and smoke.”
An alarm was raised and neighbours from all sides rushed to the scene. “Everybody rush over to see what we coulda do but it was hard,” said a neighbour. According to several eyewitnesses, persons entered the upper flat of the house and were able to salvage a few household items including, a washing machine, flat screen television set, carpets, a chair set and a few other items. “The heat was too intense. We couldn’t get out much at all and because of the wood the house ketch on fast so we had to abort and run out,” another neighbour said.
Oneeka Johnson said that at the time she was obliquely opposite at the Wisroc Health Centre, when one of the nurses alerted her to the fire. She immediately ran home but could not get too close because of the intensity of the fire. Soyinka Johnson was in a state of disbelief and sat for hours at the front of the shop, which was left standing, contemplating her next move. She told Stabroek News that it was approximately half an hour after she had returned to the National Library where she works as a librarian that she was told of the tragic incident.
“I just come back from the insurance company where I went to pay the fire insurance,” she said, “but the person to receive the payment wasn’t there at the time and I was just lying down to rest a bit when I got a call from Claudine [a neighbor] that the house on fire.”
The shaken woman said she was puzzled as to what might have caused the fire. “We use a gas stove which we don’t make any joke with we usually turn that off. We don’t really leave anything on except the fridge when we leaving home, so I really don’t understand. I really don’t,” she said.
From all accounts given by neighbours, the fire started in one of the bedrooms to the rear of the lower flat of the house. That apartment had two bedrooms. There was another one-bedroom apartment on the lower flat, while the upper wooden section had three rooms.
The fire department at Linden again came in for more criticism than praise. Persons said that they took much longer than anticipated to arrive on the scene, by which time the entire building was ablaze.
