An early morning fire at Eccles, on the East Bank of Demerara, yesterday completely gutted the home of six persons, including a three-month-old baby.
Divisional Officer of the Guyana Fire Service (GFS) Dwayne Scotland, who was on site when Stabroek News arrived at the scene, explained that preliminary enquiries revealed that the fire originated from a mattress in one of the rooms of the house, located at Lot 57 CC Eccles, East Bank Demerara.
“The mattress was on fire first… in the first bedroom [and] it was extinguished and subsequently the middle bedroom’s mattress was on fire,” Scotland explained.
Video footage seen by this newspaper shows the two-storey house being engulfed by flames, which seemingly destroyed all of the contents inside the home.
One of the residents of the home, Kevin Alleyne, said he received a call and was informed that the whole house was ablaze. “…So I rush back to see if it had anything I could do to save something,” he recalled.
He highlighted that while he wanted to save valuables in the house, persons who were looking on warned him against going too close to the burning building. “I cover my face and went in the front door [because] the fire wasn’t by the door at the time but persons were screaming ‘No! No! You can’t go in deh!’ But it was like watching somebody dying in front uh you and you can’t do nothing about it,” he said.
He went on to highlight that the family is still quite suspicious about the origin of the fire, since nothing was left plugged in or any wires exposed where the fire started. “[My family] start asking how a fire could start on a mattress just like duh… duh’s nah normal, something wrong,” he noted.
Alleyne, who noted that there were four persons at home at the time of the fire, including the baby, mentioned that no one was hurt but the damage done was truly immense.
Alleyne said that considering the renovations that were currently being conducted on his home, the fire will cost the family millions of dollars. “I could only seh is in the millions, but I can’t give you a figure…we still have to make a decision on what we gon’ do,” he explained.
Scotland explained that the cause of the fire is still unknown, but investigations were ongoing.
