The fire last month that gutted a Cummings Lodge apartment building, which was used primarily for student housing, was electrical in origin, an investigation has found.
The Guyana Fire Service has completed the investigation of the January 13 fire at the two-storey “Off Campus Lodge” and a source knowledgeable of the findings told Stabroek News that it was electrical in origin and that investigators found the electrical standards to be poor and unsafe.
Approximately 40 local and international students from the University of Guyana (UG), the Rajiv Gandhi Medical School, and the Cyril Potter College of Education were among those who lost everything in the fire.
The building, which was located at Third Street, Cummings Lodge, had 25 single and double-room apartments.
The fire was suspected to be electrical in origin from the inception of the investigation. Stabroek News was told that a tenant observed smoke emanating from the apartment where the fire began.
“I see smoke coming out from Room Two and I alert everybody and we try breaking the door. When we opened the door, we saw thick black smoke rushing and the wires start sparking; there were flames at the back and we tried to out it, but there were live wires all over the place and we couldn’t do anything about it,” Asif Baksh, a tenant, said.
Tenants had also said that they made complaints to the landlord, Tarachand Balgobin, about faulty electrical fixtures in the building but nothing was done to rectify the issues. He denied the claims made, while stating that no complaints were received by him or anyone else in management.
Balgobin, however, suggested that it was possible that the fire may have been as a result of the “misuse of the apartment’s circuitry.”
“I don’t know if it was a case were the circuitry was misused but these rooms were all independently wired. There are two points and three bulbs in each room and I can’t say if anyone expanded the circuitry to increase multiple use of a point,” he told Stabroek News in an interview a day after the fire.
Almost a week after the fire, 32 affected University of Guyana students were presented with laptops, mattresses and stationery as a result of a collaboration between the ministries of Social Protection, Education and Public Telecommunications and the Chinese Embassy.
