Sascha Wil­son

Se­nior Re­porter

sascha.wil­son@guardian.co.tt

A ware­house owned by Math­ai Im­ports Ltd was yes­ter­day gut­ted in Bar­rack­pore, re­sult­ing in ap­prox­i­mate­ly $10 mil­lion in dam­ages.

Math­ai Im­ports Ltd is a whole­sale and re­tail car ac­ces­sories busi­ness. Among the items de­stroyed were ve­hi­cle bed lin­ers, tray cov­ers, and head­lights.

The own­er is out of the coun­try, but his son Bran­don Math­ai, a di­rec­tor of the com­pa­ny, said around noon he got a phone call that the ware­house at Hare­wood Trace was on fire.

“By the time I got here, which was about ten min­utes af­ter, the en­tire thing was on fire. The shed was col­laps­ing and all the prod­ucts we had were al­ready burnt,” he re­called.

He said fire­fight­ers and the po­lice re­spond­ed with­in 15 min­utes. How­ev­er, he said, they spent hours try­ing to ex­tin­guish the flames.

“The ma­te­ri­als that the tray cov­ers are made of is plas­tic, so as much as they were try­ing to out it, it kept go­ing back up in flames,” he said.

Math­ai said there were ap­prox­i­mate­ly five work­ers em­ployed at the ware­house, but they would be ab­sorbed at oth­er lo­ca­tions. 

No one was in the ware­house when the fire broke out and there were no re­ports of in­juries.

Mean­while, res­i­dent Vane Ram­lochan thanked God that the fire did not spread to his home. He said he heard loud nois­es, and then his neigh­bour alert­ed him that the ware­house was on fire.

He im­me­di­ate­ly moved his pet dog and birds to safe­ty. With the help of his neigh­bours, he tried to ex­tin­guish the fire with wa­ter hoses and buck­ets of wa­ter, but that was fu­tile.

Up to last evening po­lice and fire of­fi­cers had not de­ter­mined the cause of the blaze. In­ves­ti­ga­tions are con­tin­u­ing.