The Guyana Fire Service is probing the cause of a fire which destroyed a house at Tuschen Scheme, East Bank Essequibo, on Wednesday morning, rendering two families homeless.
The raging fire at the Tuschen house on Wednesday morning
The fire started sometime after 09:00h at the Lot 37 Tuschen Old Scheme house.
While it is unclear what may have been the cause of the blaze, Guyana Times was told that the fire reportedly started at the back of the wooden house where the kitchen was situated in upper flat, and quickly engulfed the building, partially destroying the apartment below.
A couple and their four children, ages 10 and under, occupied the upper flat of the house. At the time of the fire, however, only three of the children were at home with their mother, Loanna Weeks.
Kim Rodrigues, the downstairs tenant, who lives with her husband and six-year-old son, related to this newspaper that she was outside doing laundry when she heard one of the children shouting for his mother upstairs and subsequent panicking cries from the woman.
The destroyed building after firefighters manage to put out most of the blaze
“I hear she keep saying ‘Oh God! Oh God!’ and then she shouted for me saying fire. When I rushed into my apartment and look, I could see the fire upstairs,” she related, while adding that at the time the fire had already taken over the back of the house.
Rodrigues noted that she immediately started to remove whatever items she could have from her apartment while Weeks grabbed her children and rushed out of the burning house.
“The fire was so heavy at the top, she couldn’t save anything,” she added of her upstairs neighbour. The woman noted that the fire service subsequently arrived and was able to douse the blaze but not before the entire wooden house was destroyed.
At the time when this publication was at the scene, Weeks had taken her children and left for a relative’s home a few villages away.
Meanwhile, the owner of the house, Claudette Singh, told Guyana Times that she was at home one street away when someone informed her about the fire. She said that by the time she arrived at the scene, the house was already destroyed.
Singh could not have said what transpired, noting that the tenant of the upper flat was not clear about how the fire started. “All me know is that people saying the fire start at the back at the kitchen… I don’t know how it start, I have to talk to the (upstairs tenant) to find out what really happen,” she stated.
According to the landlady, the family in the upper flat only moved in last October and the husband is currently in the interior working.
Meanwhile, investigations into the cause of the fire are ongoing.
