Fire Service Dispatches Team to Investigate Fatal Neuland Combustion

Life for the Sawatzky family in the Mennonite community of Neuland in Corozal will never be the same again. They lost the two youngest children in their household during a combustion and fire that left several of them seriously burnt. Ten-month-old Sara was instantly burnt to death around seven-thirty on Tuesday night and her sister, three-year-old Ana, died from burns to her entire body some hours later at the K.H.M.H. It’s a tragedy that has left the community numb. But what caused the incident? The mother, Justina and her elder daughter, Helena were accidentally filling a kerosene lamp with what is believed to be gasoline, while at the same time, attempting to light the lamp. It blew up, spilling fuel on everyone who was around and setting them ablaze. Today, the Belize National Fire Service dispatched a team to the far-flung village to conduct an investigation. Station Supervisor, Kenneth Mortis, gave us a preliminary comment today.

Kenneth Mortis

Kenneth Mortis, Station Supervisor, Belize National Fire Service

“We can look back and say, okay, this is where it started. This is from whence the fire began, so this is the root, the dispensing of the fuel. And then we’ll go down and we’ll say – hence we ask, is it a norm? There’s a certain smell detect between kerosene and gasoline. Did the families not pick up the smell? You know, I know they were well, I can only believe they were just trying to get that lamp going to create light and I guess they were probably in a rush. I really don’t know. I don’t want to put my foot in my mouth too much. Hence the reason I said there’s a lot of there’s a lot of questions surrounding this whole scenario that needs to be answered. We are the fire department will have to eventually conduct amongst ourselves to see that, you know, the probability or the rapid explosion rate that what happened, this is something that we need to do. We need to step back on and run these tests ourselves, you know, and then from there by us doing those tests, we can have an idea more or less of what happened or what went wrong but in terms of it, will there be a charge, that’s not something that I can say. This is something definitely that the fire department and the police department will work closely, and as long as we tie up all the loose ends and try to get a sense of what we went on, then we’ll see if there’s any legal aspect behind the case. Agencies responsible will now need to step in and take a look to see if they can definitely identify the observations that you all made when it comes to these tankers and these dispensers. In terms of proper labeling, um, visibility needs to be available at these pumping stations.”