For more than 12 hours, fire­fight­ers bat­tled a mas­sive blaze that gut­ted a ware­house at Cit­rus Dri­ve, En­ter­prise, Ch­agua­nas, caus­ing mil­lions of dol­lars in dam­age.

The fire be­gan around 6 pm on Mon­day at a ware­house that con­tained sup­plies for Al­isha Mar­ket­ing and Sumeds Lim­it­ed Poul­try Equip­ment and Sup­plies. Fire ap­pli­ances from Ch­agua­nas, Cou­va, Savonet­ta and Tu­na­puna bat­tled the blaze well in­to Tues­day.

In fact, fire of­fi­cers were at the scene well af­ter mid­day yes­ter­day still ex­tin­guish­ing the flames.

A man­ag­er of the fa­cil­i­ty said she was not in a po­si­tion to com­ment on the blaze and asked that me­dia redi­rect their ques­tions to the fire of­fi­cials on site.

Fire of­fi­cers said the cause of the blaze was yet to be de­ter­mined. The smoke em­a­nat­ing from the ware­house af­fect­ed scores of res­i­dents and around 12 busi­ness­es lo­cat­ed to the west of the smoul­der­ing fa­cil­i­ty along the South­ern Main Road, En­ter­prise. Busi­ness­man Har­ry Ram­goolie, who op­er­ates a sta­tionery store said he was forced to close shop ear­ly be­cause of the ex­ces­sive smoke. Ram­goolie said when the blaze start­ed he was wor­ried.

He said the flames were very high and he was con­cerned that his op­er­a­tions would have been gut­ted too.

Res­i­dents of the near­by Dass Trace Ex­ten­sion said they had no choice but to stay in­doors and deal with the smoke.

Em­ploy­ees of the af­fect­ed busi­ness, who pre­ferred not be named, said they were dis­traught that the year start­ed off on such a bad note with many now not know­ing what will hap­pen next.