AN­GE­LO JE­DIDI­AH

Re­porter

an­ge­lo.je­didi­ah@guardian.co.tt

A 74-year-old woman died in a house fire in Mor­vant on Fri­day, af­ter se­cu­ri­ty mea­sures at the prop­er­ty pre­vent­ed neigh­bours from res­cu­ing her.

Of­fi­cials said around mid­day, of­fi­cers from both the Mor­vant and San Juan Fire Sta­tions re­spond­ed to re­ports of a blaze at a two-storey house lo­cat­ed at First Cale­do­nia Road.

Pen­sion­er, Marachia ‘Agnes’ Her­nan­dez, lived in a ground-floor apart­ment of the build­ing.

Up­stairs lived a cou­ple, Ar­lene Richards and Patrick Walsh.

Ac­cord­ing to eye-wit­ness­es, screams from the ground floor were heard, which alert­ed the cou­ple and neigh­bours to the fire at Her­nan­dez’s apart­ment. Richards said the in­tense smell of smoke had ear­li­er raised her sus­pi­cion that a fire had bro­ken out some­where.

“I shout ‘fire down­stairs.’ The on­ly thing I grabbed was my phone. I start­ed call­ing the fire brigade,” Richards said yes­ter­day out­side the now-de­stroyed prop­er­ty.

“Every­thing gone. Every sin­gle liv­ing thing gone.”

Richards said her hus­band rushed to get the 74-year-old woman, along with neigh­bours, out of the apart­ment, but they all strug­gled to res­cue Her­nan­dez.

“When he opened the door, he meet up a wrought iron [gate], and he said that it had a next door, which I don’t un­der­stand. Why you have a door, a wrought iron and a next door in a house?” Richards asked.

“But they re­al­ly tried. Them guys around here. They worked to get her, but they couldn’t get her. They tried, they tried.”

She said Walsh ul­ti­mate­ly suf­fered a mas­sive heart at­tack and re­mains hos­pi­talised.

An in­ves­ti­ga­tion to de­ter­mine the cause of the fire is con­tin­u­ing.

Any­one wish­ing to as­sist Richards and her hus­band can call 335-5572.