Fire in Belize City leaves family of 8 homeless
Just because you live in a concrete house it doesn’t mean you’re safe from the peril of fire. One Belize City family discovered that fact the hard way this afternoon around three thirty.
By the time the fire service arrived on the scene, the upstairs of the four bedroom concrete house was already in full blaze.
Henry Baizar, Fire Chief
“The people, the occupants saw smoke coming out from the roof and they hurriedly got the children out and they went out of the building.”
The house, situated at twenty five T Street in the Port Loyola area, was occupied by eight members of the Williams family. The owner Ruth Williams was not at home at the time of the blaze. While the Fire Department was unable to save the upstairs part of the house, family members and neighbors quickly managed to save most of the household furnishings. In responding to neighbors complaints that the Fire Department took long to extinguish the flames, Fire Chief Henry Baizar said there were a couple of problems that triggered the delay. For one, Baizar says because the source of the fire was inside the roof they had to use different strategies to fight it.
Henry Baizar
“We had to get people with breathing apparatus to go into the ceiling because we can’t send the people up inside the ceiling because it is full of smoke and what not. The fire was concentrated in the ceiling of the building and the building is one of these houses with a huge ceiling, a huge roof and so the fire was concentrate in the ceiling of the building. And so we had to get people with breathing apparatus and they had to go in by pairs and the tanks on their backs would only last for a certain period of time. And so we had to get enough tanks to send the guys in and they go in two in, two out, two in, two out until they actually try to get the fire out.”
Another problem Baizar said is that in that particular neighborhood, fire hydrants are few and far between.
Henry Baizar
“There is not much hydrants in the area and there is no open source in the area. The canal, the river and the sea is far away, so we cannot go to any of those things. Normally when we have fires in town, where we have water there is no problem, but in this area we have to rely on the hydrants or rely on the water that’s in the tanks of the trucks.”
Baizar says because the fire started from inside the roof of the building, he suspects the fire may have been caused by poor electrical wiring.
The building and its contents were insured by I.C.B.
