Sascha Wil­son

Se­nior Re­porter

sascha.wil­son@guardian.co.tt

For hours, fire­fight­ers bat­tled a rag­ing fire, re­sult­ing in mil­lions of dol­lars in loss­es af­ter a two-sto­ry build­ing hous­ing A&S Fy­zo­ol Su­per­mar­ket and a home along Bonne Aven­ture Road, Gas­par­il­lo, was gut­ted.

The fire start­ed just be­fore 4 am in the busi­ness place on the ground floor, leav­ing sev­en peo­ple home­less who resided up­stairs in the build­ing.

Fire­fight­ers bat­tled the blaze for hours due to chem­i­cals, au­to­mo­tive oil and oth­er flam­ma­ble sub­stances stored on the com­pound.

Own­er Rick Mo­hammed said a neigh­bour alert­ed him to the fire around 4.30 am. He said his five ten­ants safe­ly evac­u­at­ed af­ter the fire start­ed.

“They evac­u­at­ed in the back, and they went through by the neigh­bour fence, so every­body is safe, so that is good.”

Still await­ing the of­fi­cial cause of the fire, Mo­hammed said, “It seems as though, I’m not say­ing it is, but it seems as though it’s elec­tri­cal, be­cause yes­ter­day, elec­tric­i­ty went in the area, and it didn’t come back.”

While fire­fight­ers re­spond­ed prompt­ly, Mo­hammed said they faced wa­ter prob­lems.

“They had to get some trucks with some tanks and so on.”

He es­ti­mat­ed that his loss­es would run in­to the mil­lions, de­scrib­ing the de­struc­tion as to­tal.

As­sis­tant Chief Fire Of­fi­cer for South­ern Di­vi­sion Noel Stew­art said ini­tial­ly fire­fight­ers from the Mon Re­pos Fire Sta­tion re­spond­ed, but they had to get as­sis­tance from Pe­nal and Savonet­ta Fire Sta­tions, as well as from WASA, T&TEC and the po­lice, to bring the fire un­der con­trol.

“In that build­ing, they housed ac­cel­er­ants and aerosols and oils for ve­hi­cles, and that caused a bit of a chal­lenge for us be­cause there was con­stant burn­ing and flar­ing up, but we were able to con­tain the fire.”

He said ini­tial­ly they had an is­sue with wa­ter, but it was quick­ly re­solved, ow­ing to as­sis­tance from the oth­er ap­pli­ances, WASA and the re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tion.

Thank­ing every­one in­volved for their as­sis­tance and ef­fi­cien­cy, he said they were able to pre­vent the fire from spread­ing to an­oth­er res­i­dence at the back of the gut­ted build­ing.

Stew­art al­so em­pha­sised the im­por­tance of fire pro­tec­tion equip­ment, such as fire ex­tin­guish­ers and smoke de­tec­tors, in homes and busi­ness­es, not­ing that such equip­ment saves lives. He said the cause of the fire was still to be de­ter­mined.