Fire guts Phillipine home

Sooklalsingh, 36, was asleep after a day of work when he was awakened by his neighbours at about 1.20 am on Tuesday to lime with them under the shed just opposite the now destroyed house on Solomon Avenue, Phillipine, near San Fernando. While under the shed, one of his neighbours told him that they saw fire running across a high-tension wire connected to the house. “I thought them was joking, you know, but when I start running upstairs, I saw all the smoke,” Sooklalsingh said. Sooklalsingh said he ran upstairs to inspect further, but the fire had already spread throughout the upstairs of the two-story house rendering it impossible for him to enter.

Sooklalsingh shared the house with another man and they both worked as welders and fabricators for the owner of the house, Teemull Dubar, 57, who operates as a small contractor. The second man was asleep in a room downstairs when the fire broke out, completely unaware of what was happening until he was forced to jump through the window to escape the flames.

“I lost everything except the short pants and vest I had on and the cellphone in my hand,” Sooklalsingh said. He added, “I called the fire service and all we could have done after that was watch as the whole house burned down. Right now I staying by a friend and we trying to not talk about what happened because I still really shaken up about it.” The owner of the house, Dubar, estimates that he has lost at least $700,000 in property and equipment damage, which includes jack hammers, circular saws and drills. The floor of second storey of the house also caved in and destroyed a Ford Ranger that was parked under the house. Dubar speculated that the wooden floors of the five-bedroom house could be the reason why the fire spread quickly.

Dubar said that Fire Officers from the Mon Repos Fire Station reached the scene about 25 minutes after they were called. Their investigations into the cause of the fire are continuing.