Tragic fire leaves
about 12 homeless
~ Tenants insist fire was electrical, blame landlord ~
DUTCH QUARTER--Tragedy struck for residents of a Dutch Quarter apartment building Tuesday morning when a supposedly electrical fire ripped through the wooden two-storey block of apartments they had been renting, leaving about a dozen people, including two babies, homeless.
The blaze sent the mostly immigrant tenants scattering from their affordably-priced housing units about 6:45am and drew dozens of other residents in the tightly-packed Madrid Drive community out of their houses to watch the apartments at #14 burn. Fire-fighters contained the blaze within 90 minutes, but were unable to save the building.
When the flames had been extinguished and the smoke had subsided, the apartment building was little more than a burnt-out husk. “Man, I lose everything in the house there,” lamented Roger Bromwell, a Jamaican immigrant.
Residents blamed the fire on a problem with the building’s electrical wiring, which they said had sparked a fire in the lower units on Monday. The burned-out tenants accused their former landlord of negligence in not ensuring the building was safe after Monday’s fire.
Electric sparks and a thick cloud of black smoke had forced young mother Simone “Lisa” Rowe to flee from her one-room unit with her seven-month-old son in her arms early Monday evening. She said the landlord had blamed her new television set for the blaze, but she insists otherwise.
“He tell me say is my TV that start the fire, but it is a brand-new [set],” Rowe told The Daily Herald, explaining that the problem appeared to have been with the wiring and not with her TV, which the fire had destroyed. “You can see it burn inside.”
Neighbours in the small community had helped shut off the apartment’s circuit breaker to prevent further damage, but someone turned it back on later that night. Police confirmed this in their report to this newspaper yesterday.
The tenants blamed their landlord for switching the power back on, while the man insisted he had given no instructions to restore power to the units.
The landlord said another tenant, his “electrician,” had gone through the housing unit after the first fire Monday and declared it safe. But he added: “I didn’t tell a soul to turn it on.” Rowe maintained that the man had turned the current back on.
The low-cost units were reportedly in an already fragile state when the fire raged through the apartments. The monthly rent for most of the units was between $200 and $300 and, according to residents of the area, the Public Works Department had targeted them for demolition.
“The Public Works had come here and say they were going to break the place down,” one neighbour said.
A representative of Public Works could not confirm that the building had been marked for demolition, but said many such structures had been built 10 to 20 years ago without building permits.
Most of the tenants were left with only the clothes on their backs and each had his/her own story to tell about dealing with the consequences of the fire.
St. Maarten Red Cross and I Can Foundation representatives were on the scene, offering assistance to the fire victims in the form of clothes, food and shelter.
Officially, the cause of the fire is still not known, but residents maintain that it was electrical. “The detectives, Forensic Department and Fire Department are doing their investigations to determine exactly what happened,” the police said in their report of the incident.
Security guards
Security guards Trevor Blair and Danville were among the 12 fire victims who lost their homes Tuesday.
Barnes, an A-Team Security officer, was at work at Maho when he was informed by telephone that his apartment was on fire. By the time, he arrived home everything had been destroyed by the fire.
Checkmate Security employee Blair was also finishing up his late shift when his live-in companion informed him about the fire. Blair was not as upset as many of the tenants after the fire, despite losing 11 years worth of possessions accumulated since his arrival on the island and many of his personal documents in the blaze.
“Everything gone from me, but I’m still alive,” said Blair, who mentioned that he had been able to safeguard his Jamaican passport from the night before.
Blair and his companion planned to stay in a house adjacent to the destroyed apartments, while Barnes planed to stay with friends.
The young mothers
Asheka Gumbs has a one-year-old daughter. Simone Rowe has a seven-month-old son. They are both originally from Jamaica, they are both currently unemployed, and they are now both homeless as a result of Tuesday’s fire.
Rowe was near to tears Tuesday thinking about having to “start over without work” and without her “baby father.” The young mother, who had been laid off from a job at Princess Heights Hotel recently, said all she had managed to save were her “baby suitcase” and her passport, which had been on the suitcase at the time of the fire.
Feeling frustrated by her landlord’s apparent indifference to her plight at the scene, she insisted that he could have prevented the tragedy by not allowing the lights back on.
The unexpected hero
When the sounds of anguished screams roused Jimmy Johnson from his bed Tuesday morning, he did not expect that fire would engulf his apartment within minutes and leave him and about dozen others homeless and with few options. All he was worried about at the time, he said, was keeping the blaze in a lower unit of the apartment building from becoming an explosive pillar of fire.
Johnson, who accidentally slashed his left forearm and several fingers on his right hand while trying to snatch gas cylinders from the units, said he had lost everything he had, including his passport and other identification, in the blaze, but he managed to prevent the cylinders from exploding under the intense heat.
The shocked father
Tears streamed down the face of Haitian national Genes Moise on Tuesday when his 16-year-old son Mito approached him through the smoke and debris, appearing shocked at the sight of losing his home. The two hugged for a long minute before parting slowly with smoke and ash falling on their faces.
Moise, who was very emotional after the fire, said he had lost more than US $1,000 he had been saving. He warded off verbal attacks from another resident questioning the logic of saving large amounts of money in his apartment, insisting, “It was my money.”
