His vehicle exploded this afternoon on the Northern Highway and he lost everything in it but tonight E. Thompson is lucky he saved his life. Thompson - who works at the Corozal Border was driving to Belize City when he saw smoke coming out of his engine. A team from CTV-3 was passing the area at the time and captured the aftermath on camera. Thompson told CTV-3 what happened.
E. Thompson,
"The smoke started to come from underneath the flooring and it just pushed out by the dash board, by the speaker boxes, the stereo system, and so I already knew it was the engine and so I loosed my seatbelt, jumped out, and when I jumped out it exploded. That's it. The whole vehicle caught fire and just blew up. I just took out what was in the front seat along with me, my clothes and so and my tennis. Only that I was able to take out."
904 SMART Customers Dialed in for Hurricane Relief
After the Hurricane Dean disaster in the north, SMART asked customers to donate $5 of phone credit to assist with relief efforts. 904 customers did and today SMART handed over a check for $10,000 check to the Red Cross. SMART's customer care and quality manager Marie Gomez says the company matched the donation from customers.
Marie Gomez, SMART
"We had pledged to make two contributions in cooperation with our customers. They are the ones who donated part of this fund. SMART had planned to match the donation so what we did is 904 customers donated by dialing *icare and automatically they donated $5 to the fund. We matched that and rounded it to $10,000. This is the first contribution, the fund continues and hopefully within two weeks we should be presenting another check to the Red Cross."
Karen Diaz, President - Belize Red Cross
"Unless our donors have a very specific request, we put all the donations into one big pot and we work up a plan of action and then we put all the donations that we have together towards making that plan of action come through."
SMART plans to make another donation within the next two weeks. On Monday the company also gave the Red Cross 5 phones for use during the hurricane season.
