CLICK HERE TO JOIN OUR WHAT’S APP GROUP
SOURCE:NEWS SOURCE GUYANA- Parents rushed back to the Mae’s School in Subryanville this morning as a massive fire engulfed the school’s wooden building. Many parents had already dropped their children off at the school early.
The Fire Service was summoned just at around 8 o’ clock this morning as an alarm was raised. Students who were already in the school were rushed out and moved across the road to a playfield as four fire tenders arrived and started to battle the blaze.
Aided by strong winds from the nearby Atlantic Ocean, the fire quickly engulfed the two-story building in Third Avenue, Subryanville. The large clouds of smoke billowing into the sky could have been seen across the city from several miles away.
Back at the scene, Firemen could be seen attempting to douse the blaze from several various positions, including from overhead using the Skylift fire tender. A fireman was injured during the battle with the blaze and was treated on site by Emergency Medical Technicians.
It took the Fire Service more than two hours to completely extinguish the blaze.
Although a cause of the fire is still to be determined, it is suspected that it was electrical in origin. One of the janitorial staff members at the school, Ronetta Sommerset said she had just reported for duty when a young child rushed to her and informed her that there was fire in the ceiling of one of the classes.
The woman said she immediately went into action, raising an alarm while getting the children who were already at school out of the building.
The School’s Administrator Lucinda McCurdy said the little boy also alerted teachers to the blaze.
“A little boy, he said miss smoke is coming from the roof and before you knew it that was it,” she said.
McCurdy said the teachers and other staff members immediately began to evacuate the students while attempts were made to extinguish the fire.
She said all of the students were safely ushered out of the school building.
A parent, Imran Ali, said he had already dropped one of his sons to his classroom and was waiting in his car with another son when he heard the screams for fire and saw the confusion.
“Ten minutes after, I see everybody running out of the school. So, I just jumped out the car and looked, somebody say fire, and when I looked up in the attic, through the vent you see small smoke coming out. So, I run upstairs to his class, and when I went to his class, the class was empty, and then I opened the door to see if everybody went out, and one of the cleaners said, one of the class-room but I didn’t know it was which one. So, I run to the grade 4 and I open the door I see it in the ceiling, and so, I just grabbed a fire extinguisher that went right there, and I start spraying, but that wasn’t enough. The smoke get thick on me, so I had to drop and run, and I tell the cleaner run out,” Ali recalled.
He said the fire quickly spread to other parts of the building, and consumed it within minutes.
As firefighters from across the region battled the blaze with the use of two Bronto Skylift fire trucks and a number of fire tenders, Minister of Home Affairs Robeson Benn said at the time of receiving news of the fire, the Guyana Fire Service had already dispatched firefighters to the location.
“It looks as though we have complete destruction of the school, which is a seemingly fairly old building. I don’t have anymore details at this moment but we are engaged and given the layout and the question of heat and all of those things, the firemen are working quite well,” Minister Benn said.
He said he was happy that everyone made it out safe.
“We have asked that the kids go home with their teachers, because of course there is no school today once we would have accounted for all of the children and all of the persons who are supposed to be in school at this time,” Minister Benn said.
Divisional Officer (Operations), Andrew Holder told reporters that due to the magnitude of the blaze, he requested assistance from firefighters and equipment from the outskirts of Georgetown.
“At first, we employed an aggressive fire fighting mode, an offensive firefighting mode, but as we continued fire fighting engagement, we had to reshape that approach to a very defensive one, given that the combustibles in both buildings were quite a lot and it posed a severe threat to life and limb of my fire fighters, and so, we employed a defensive mode until we able to actually get into the building at some point to extinguish the fire,” Holder explained.
Holder said the firefighters were able to contain the blaze within 45 minutes. He said without the Bronto Skylifts the fire would not have been contained in a short time.
There were at least nine fire tenders on the scene in addition to the two Skylifts.
CLICK HERE TO JOIN OUR WHAT’S APP GROUP
CLICK HERE TO JOIN OUR WHAT’S APP GROUP
CLICK HERE TO JOIN OUR WHAT’S APP GROUP
CLICK HERE TO JOIN OUR WHAT’S APP GROUP
CLICK HERE TO JOIN OUR WHAT’S APP GROUP
CLICK HERE TO JOIN OUR WHAT’S APP GROUP
CLICK HERE TO JOIN OUR WHAT’S APP GROUP
CLICK HERE TO JOIN OUR WHAT’S APP GROUP
Advertise with the mоѕt vіѕіtеd nеwѕ ѕіtе іn Antigua!
We offer fully customizable and flexible digital marketing packages.
Contact us at [email protected]
Hope it’s not the case of another spoiled brat doing this again