Fire leaves 10 homeless

A FAMILY of ten, including five children, were left homeless by fire which completely gutted their Ste Madeleine home yesterday.
“I don’t know where we will live. The neighbours keep telling us we could stay by them. But I don’t know,” Ramdoolarie Maharaj, 37, told Newsday as she and her family watched the ruins of their home. Ironically, the rains came and doused the remaining fire, shortly after the blaze swept through and destroyed the structure.

Maharaj lived upstairs her two-storey house at Belle Vue Street, Ste Madeleine, with common-law husband Alvin Sinanan, 39, her sister Sheila Maharaj and her (Ramdoolarie) children Allan, two, Jessica, 12, and Jagesh, 18. Her brother-in-law Robert Sinanan, 34, his wife, Cyan Gunness, 26, and their children Steven, six, and Shenice, four, lived downstairs. Recalling the events to Newsday, the distressed woman said around 10 am, she had just finished cooking lunch and was in the kitchen with her sister and son, Allan. She said Allan wanted to go downstairs by his uncle, so she told him to go to the front step and call to him (the uncle) to come for him (Allan). “But he Allan was only calling me and calling me. I was going to see what he wanted and when I walked through the drawing room, I saw black smoke. When I looked in the bedroom the panel box was on fire, all the electrical wires were on fire,” Maharaj said.

“I ran for my son, grabbed him and ran out the house. I started bawling ‘fire, fire,” she added. Maharaj said her brother-in-law threw several buckets of water in an attempt to douse the flames, but by this time it was too late. She said several bags of feed, which were stored in the garage and were to be sold, also were destroyed in the fire. The woman, who complained that she had lost everything, appealed to the Trinidad and Tobago Electri-city Commission to compensate her for her losses, which she estimated to be almost $200,000. Investiga-tions are continuing.