Fire destroyed a house at Cove and John, East Coast Demerara yesterday morning leaving a family of three devastated and lamenting the loss of a home they had only recently renovated.
Neighbours ran to rescue 74-year-old Jasmattie Rambaghan who collapsed after seeing the place she had called home for the last 44 years engulfed in flames . About an hour after the fire the woman was still trying to control her tears while her neighbours consoled her and encouraged her to remember that she still had life.
They recounted only seeing thick smoke emanating from the top flat of the woman’s house and as word spread the fire department was called.
The fire spread in minutes, however, and the building was soon levelled. A still shaken Rambaghan said she had no idea what could have caused the fire. She and her two grandchildren, whom she had raised, occupied the two-flat home while an adjoining two-bedroom house was unoccupied.
“Me nah know is wah happen. All we hear is that smoke a top of the house and the pickney them run to see wah happen and me run behind them. But we couldn’t see, ’cause was too much thick black smoke and we had to run back out ,” the woman told Stabroek News. She said they were in the bottom flat at the time they received the alert.
She said her grandchildren Mahadeo and Gopaul were without parents and so she had raised them from babies. At the time this newspaper visited yesterday both of them had been taken to a city hospital since they had serious health reactions to the smoke. Their grandmother said she was worried about how her granddaughter would be able to complete college.
Asked what she felt may have caused the fire, the woman was unable to answer and said she could not remember whether anything electrical was still plugged in. However she noted that all cooking and other activities took place in the concrete bottom flat of the house and so it was impossible for those to have caused the fire.
“Nobody couldn’t go in to save nothing; all I believe save is a fridge and two boom boxes and we microwave,” she said. A neighbour interjected, adding that the motorcycle belonging to the woman’s grandson had also been retrieved.
The family had only recently renovated their four-bedroom home.
A neighbour, Hemwantie Manogan who is also Rambaghan’s granddaughter, said she was told of the fire by someone who lived in the neighbouring village, Victoria.
“They said they saw the thick smoke over here and… they said that they thought it was our house, not realizing that it was my grandmother’s home ,” she said.
She said the fire raged through the building quickly, and by the time the fire department arrived, though they tried their best, the flames had already taken over.
Meanwhile another of the woman’s grandchildren who arrived on the scene mere minutes before Stabroek News, said she was at work in the city when she got the news.
Seeing the rubble, she too started crying. She said she had no idea what may have caused the fire. She said she knew that her grandmother had an altar in the top flat of the building where she said prayers but when she had been asked if any candle was lit at the time, she had answered no.
