A blaze broke out last night at the corner of Mex Avenue and Fairweather Street. While the home was destroyed, it was abandoned, so there was no loss of life or property.
At least, it was supposed to be abandoned. The occupant passed away in January, and his family lives in the US. The person who was watching over the home boarded it up. However, someone seemed to have found their way into the building and had been living in there, since the fire department found evidence of a mattress.
The station supervisor told us more today.
Kenneth Mortis, Station Supervisor, NFS
"The information is very limited in terms of owner, occupant. We can tell you that approximately a few minutes before 10:30 last night, we received a call of the building on fire. When we arrived, that building was totally engulfed in flames. We managed to extinguish the fire, limiting the damages to that one structure whereby an investigation started. The investigation revealed that it was a 36x24 elevated structure of mixed type. What we did learn was one of the rooms located in the southeastern portion of the building where the fire reportedly started from had a single bed with a mattress which showed that somebody was occupying the building even though we know the building was an abandoned building. At this time, we cannot, or we have not been able to identify who is the owner, whether the owner is alive or dead, whether he's in the country, out of the country, so to speak we can't even identify who was the sole person occupying the building, probably in the next couple days that person will reveal himself as he will then try to get assistance from the other government agencies. How the fire started exactly has still not been determined as yet, prematurely it shows signs that the occupants might have left something burning in the room which fell and caught the mattress on fire which in turn burned down the structure. So to speak, we weren't really forthcoming with the neighbors, they weren't really cooperating with us in terms of what they know so we can put a closure to this particular fire."
Courtney Menzies:
"They say that even though there is a fire station right on Fairweather, another firetruck had to be dispatched from the Northside station as well at Marion Jones, so can you tell us why that was?"
Kenneth Mortis, Station Supervisor, NFS
"Protocol. The fire department standard operating procedures is once there's a structural or house fire in progress regardless of the location of that fire, two stations are always deployed simultaneously, one will always reach before the next but the protocol is we dispatch both stations."
