Fire in Orange Walk Town guts a home

A cement bungalow located on Dr. George Street in Orange Walk Town was totally destroyed by fire on Thursday night. The Orange Walk Fire Department got the call shortly after ten p.m., and by the time they responded a couple minutes after, the home was engulfed. The twenty-five by thirty foot structure is the property of Maria Isabel Ramirez, owner of the popular ceviche restaurant Enramada. Ramirez was at her place of business when she was alerted about the fire. Only her two daughters and a six-month-old baby were at home, but nobody was hurt. According to Orange Walk Fire Chief Kenneth Mortis, preliminary investigations suggest that the cause of the blaze was electrical. He says nobody was cooking in the home, and the structure was last wired more than twenty years ago, so that is their best guess at this time. There were reports from the scene that the two fire trucks which fought the blaze arrived without water, but Mortis dismissed those as ridiculous. What News Five has been able to confirm from other sources, though, is that one of the trucks left to refill, while the other stayed to contain the fire. The truck that left was unable to return. That’s because it broke down. We understand that the condition of the road was so bad that it caused the battery to jump out of its bracket and ground out on the metal frame of the truck, leaving it stranded in the middle of the road. All the family’s possessions were lost in the fire.