Six persons lost their home after a midday fire devastated a South Ruimveldt house yesterday.
According to Ven Chance, the man who was living in the house along with his wife, his mother-in-law and three children, he received a call around 2PM from someone informing him that his house was on fire.
“I reached here quick and it was blazing already,” the emotionally-distraught Chance told Stabroek News yesterday as he watched the firefighters try to salvage his 115 Caneview Avenue home.
“The loss was a lot, everything went down and there’s nothing else I can say at this moment because we don’t know everything. The whole house with everything a normal house would have went down,” the man added, while noting that at the time of the fire his mother-in-law and his eight-year-old son were home. “Fortunately they were able to get out before it got worse,” he added.
According to the fire service’s Head of Operations Compton Sparman, the fire service received a call about the fire sometime before two and subsequently sent three fire tenders; one from West Ruimveldt and two from headquarters at Stabroek Square. “When we got here, the entire building was engulfed in flames and there are two buildings very close to the house on each side but as you can see only the guttering was damaged. I must commend the firefighters because the downstairs is untouched and was only damaged by the water and only three-quarters of the upstairs was destroyed,” he noted.
He explained that according to the information they received, the eight-year-old was upstairs while his grandmother was downstairs right before the fire started. “The child came downstairs and the grandmother saw the fire and raised an alarm so by the time they left, the entire house was in flames,” he explained, while stating that it was too early to make a pronouncement on the cause of the fire.
According to one of the neighbours, a little before 2pm there was a loud explosion and thick black smoke and flames were then seen at the house. “From what I see the fire start from the middle upstairs and I hear something like a gas bottle go ‘boof, boof, boof’ and I run and see what going on but by that time I turn around I see the fire service,” the man, who did not want to be named, explained.
The man added that one of their elderly neighbours was trapped in her yard because of a locked gate and he and other residents had to break the gate down to rescue her.
