Three children who were reportedly left home alone for almost an entire day while their father worked were dramatically rescued from their burning house at Lot 91 Crane Housing Scheme, West Coast Demerara, yesterday.

The children, aged nine, seven and three years old, had been locked into the apartment by their father, according to neighbours. One neighbour, Roxlyn Yearwood told this newspaper that the children said they had been playing with matches in a bedroom and a mattress caught fire, with flames quickly engulfing the room.

Yearwood said she smelled smoke and heard the screams of the children and she ran outside to the sight of raging flames.

“I run to rescue the children and found a big locked padlock on the door,” Yearwood recounted. “I hear the children hollering through the side window.

They jumped out the window one by one and we caught them.”

She added that the children were safe and uninjured and had since been taken away by relatives.

Though some items of furniture and personal effects were saved from the lower flat, everything in the top flat of the two-storey house was destroyed.

Neighbours said that although the fire service was summoned immediately upon discovery of the fire, by the time the fire tender could have arrived from Leonora, some ten minutes away, the fire had already done most of its damage.

The owner of the house only two weeks ago rented out the upstairs of the house, which is said to be valued at $3.2 million.

But the owner told this newspaper that the insurance policy on the property had lapsed.

When this newspaper arrived on the scene, the electricity lines to the property had already been cut by the Guyana Power and Light (GPL) and power to the area turned off.