Trinidad: Young heroes battle apartment building fire

(Trinidad Guardian) Young peo­ple in Or­chid Gar­dens, Pleas­antville, were he­roes on Sat­ur­day when a fire broke out in an apart­ment build­ing on Sat­ur­day.

The fire start­ed in Build­ing C, de­scribed by po­lice as one of the hottest crime blocks in the HDC com­mu­ni­ty, at around 4.30 pm in the apart­ment of Mar­cia Hug­gins.

 
Hug­gins said she had just re­turned home and was tak­ing a nap on her liv­ing room couch when she be­gan smelling smoke. When she got up, she dis­cov­ered that the bed­room was on fire. She grabbed a fire ex­tin­guish­er and tried to tack­le the blaze but the ex­tin­guish­er was not work­ing.

“I called my neigh­bour but her ex­tin­guish­er was not work­ing as well. We ran the hose up the stairs and tried to use wa­ter but there was not enough pres­sure to reach up­stairs,” she said.

It was then the young peo­ple from the com­mu­ni­ty rushed to her aid. Led by the An­drews broth­ers, they quick­ly formed a buck­et brigade and be­gan dous­ing the flames be­fore they could spread to oth­er apart­ments. Fire of­fi­cers took more than half an hour to re­spond even though the Mon Re­pos Fire Head­quar­ters is just over a mile away.

Hug­gins said she was grate­ful to those who as­sist­ed. At least three oth­er apart­ments were af­fect­ed by the blaze. Two were wa­ter­logged and an­oth­er sus­tained heat dam­age.

San Fer­nan­do East MP Ran­dal Mitchell and coun­cil­lor Robert Par­ris, who has been a fa­ther fig­ure for the young peo­ple, were on the scene with­in min­utes.

Par­ris said he was proud of the young peo­ple, many of whom had stig­ma­tized be­cause of crime. He said they were of­ten not hired be­cause of that stig­ma, even though many of them are will­ing to work and change their lives.

Mitchell said he had spo­ken to of­fi­cials from HDC and arrange­ments are be­ing made to pro­vide al­ter­na­tive ac­com­mo­da­tion for the dis­placed fam­i­lies. Asked about struc­tur­al de­fects at the apart­ment build­ing, Mitchell said he had been bom­bard­ed with com­plaints about con­di­tions. He said the HDC is do­ing a scope of works to have the apart­ments up­grad­ed and plumb­ing re­pairs will al­so be done.

Kevon An­drews, who led the buck­et brigade, said he was thank­ful that every­one came to­geth­er to help out.

“All we need is love and uni­ty you know. All I want is to come to­geth­er as one peo­ple,” he said.

An­drews said the 16 young peo­ple who were part of the res­cue ef­fect felt sat­is­fied that they had made a pos­i­tive dif­fer­ence in the lives of four fam­i­lies.