A man is now dead and a family of four homeless, after an early morning fire gutted a two-storey house at Diamond Housing Scheme, East Bank Demerara yesterday.
Dead is Thakur Singh, 59, who lived in the garage of his nephew’s Lot 479 Fourth Street, Diamond Housing Scheme home.
According to Jitendra Singh, the owner of the property, he was abruptly awakened from his sleep around 3 am yesterday by a noise in his house. He said he and his wife and two children were asleep upstairs, while his uncle who dwelled in the garage was downstairs.
“… I thought was probably thief man or something of the sort and I immediately woke my wife to tell her, you know, something is wrong,” Singh said.
The man said he opened his bedroom door and was greeted by “thick, thick” black smoke. Realising then that there was a fire in his home, Singh said, he ran down several flights of stairs into the bottom flat to see if he could’ve opened the door to escape along with his family.
“By that time my son and daughter and wife were awake and when I run down the stairs my son had followed me, but my wife, Kamini Singh, was still upstairs along with my daughter… they couldn’t run behind me because of the smoke,” the still emotionally distraught man recalled.
Instead, they had made their way to a veranda at the back of the house, which he said had no exit point outside of the house.
“So upon realizing that the fire was too much and I couldn’t try to extinguish it, I had to go get my wife and daughter from the back veranda. I climbed onto a black tank at the side and I tell them to jump,” Singh said. Though they were scared at first, they eventually took the jump which saved them from the scorching fire.
It was at that point, Singh related, that he realized that his uncle was nowhere in sight and might still be in the house. However, by then, the entire house was in flames and he could not attempt a rescue. He said he did not hear any screams or any indication that the man was in there, but after the fire had been put out firefighters retrieved his remains.
Singh could not estimate his losses. He said he had worked and built the house over a period of 12 years. Along with the entire house, his cousin’s minibus, which was parked in the yard, was torched. Singh and his family were unable to save anything but the clothes on their backs. However, he was able to push his vehicle, a taxi, several feet away from the house to save it from being damaged.
Singh was convinced that the Guyana Fire Service, which he said took over an hour to respond, could have saved part of his house and possibly his uncle if they had arrived sooner.
“Even if they had come 15 minutes … earlier they could’ve saved the top,” he added. However, it was related to Stabroek News that the first fire tender to respond was from West Ruimveldt since the others were already occupied fighting an earlier fire in Kaneville, which claimed the life of an eight-month old baby.
In relation to the cause of the fire, Singh said he believed it might have started in his uncle’s room. “He usually cooks and stuff so he might have left something on and it might have started there,” he related.
He was not sure where he and his family were going to stay.
