Senior Reporter
jensen.lavende@guardian.co.tt
A fire at an apartment building in Port-of-Spain on Friday led to the deaths of two women and saw some tenants jumping several feet down, resulting in broken limbs in a bid to escape the flames.
Fortunately, a baby was rescued by T&TEC officials from the blaze.
According to fire officials, they responded to a fire at the Coehlo Building along Prince Street between Charlotte and Nelson Streets, Port-of-Spain, around 9.30 pm on Friday.
Officers said approximately 30 people lived on the third floor of the building and, upon arrival, rescued four people, some from inside the building and others from the roof. Those rescued ranged in age between 18 and 55.
In a social media post, the Trinidad and Tobago Electricity Commission thanked its workers for rescuing the baby.
Fire officers told Guardian Media that after extinguishing the blaze, officers left around 2.30 am and returned some four hours later when the lighting was more conducive to completing their job, as electricity was cut to the surrounding building areas during the fire.
During a walkthrough of the third floor, where the fire was mostly contained, officers discovered the bodies of the women, identified as 23-year-old Aaliyah Griffith and 60-year-old Susan Ramlogan, in a bathroom and a bedroom.
Fire officials said the cause of the fire is yet to be determined and estimated the damage to be around $4 million, while the building is estimated to be valued at $10 million.
When Guardian Media visited the area, the ground floor, which houses two butcher shops, was open for business with fire officials still on site. People were overheard talking about the fire and how some tenants, who are now hospitalised with broken limbs, leapt to safety when the fire broke out.
One of the tenants, who did not want to be identified, said she thought it was just a normal night of neighbours fighting, only to realise her home was on fire.
“We was hearing little noise, so we thought it was fighting. We did already close up the place and when we came outside, as me and my mother open the gate there, we just saw one of the people from upstairs jump down.”
She added: “We run back inside, well, I run inside, to look to put on some clothes and take up me son and to pick up wherever I could, which was documents and things. Then we came downstairs, but it had people on top of the building still. All I could do was pray.”
Deolal Singh, the owner of Meat Mouth Company Limited, said his workers assisted in rescuing some of the tenants. He said that while there was a fire at the building in the 40 years he has been there, this was the first time that it ended with deaths.
Singh added that the entire ordeal was surreal.
“They had people trapped on the top floor. Two persons jumped from the top floor and jumped on the landing here. And they broke their feet. We had to drag them down the building last night and leave them here. There were about 15 people to the top floor, who was on the tip-top. They had to jump over to the next building on the next side. And then they had to come and rescue them because they had a little baby.”
Both tenants said that while they knew of the women who died, they were not too familiar with them and could not speak much about them. Singh said Ramlogan worked in a bakery with her husband, who also lived and worked in the building.
