Ot­to Car­ring­ton

Se­nior Re­porter

ot­to.car­ring­ton@cnc3.co.tt

Many busi­ness­es in and around the Globe City Com­plex in Chase Vil­lage, Ch­agua­nas, re­mained closed yes­ter­day, as clean-up and in­ves­ti­ga­tion work by the T&T Fire Ser­vice con­tin­ued fol­low­ing a dev­as­tat­ing fire at the RS 2000 Ware­house on Tues­day.

When Guardian Me­dia vis­it­ed, sev­er­al com­mer­cial op­er­a­tors re­mained closed, with smoke and fumes lin­ger­ing in the air. Fire of­fi­cials were al­so back at the site ac­tive­ly damp­en­ing lin­ger­ing hotspots and con­tin­u­ing their probe in­to the cause of the fire.

The fire tore through the east­ern sec­tion of the ware­house com­plex on Mon­day morn­ing.

Ware­house own­er Vi­jay Jaglal es­ti­mat­ed the loss­es at mil­lions of dol­lars. He not­ed that the af­fect­ed sec­tion of the build­ing had been leased to Chi­nese na­tion­als Jain Pin You and her hus­band Wayne Qui, op­er­a­tors of NU Cen­tu­ry and Quick­er Trad­ing.

On Tues­day, how­ev­er, Pin You said the full ex­tent of loss­es would take time to as­sess, as their com­put­er sys­tems con­tain­ing crit­i­cal stock records were de­stroyed in the blaze.

Jaglal al­so raised con­cerns about a pri­or in­ci­dent two months ago, in which se­cu­ri­ty footage al­leged­ly cap­tured an in­di­vid­ual car­ry­ing bot­tles of gaso­line near the com­pound, be­fore re­mov­ing a cam­era and leav­ing the area. The mat­ter was re­port­ed­ly lodged with po­lice, but no sus­pect has yet been iden­ti­fied.

Be­yond struc­tur­al loss­es, Jaglal said the fire has al­so im­pact­ed the liveli­hoods of an es­ti­mat­ed 40 peo­ple. Apart from the busi­ness, three food ven­dors op­er­ate on the com­pound.

The TTFS Cen­tral Fire In­ves­ti­ga­tions Unit is ex­pect­ed to lead the on­go­ing probe, as au­thor­i­ties con­tin­ue to de­ter­mine the cause of the fire and whether foul play was in­volved.