FOR THE SECOND time in a week, tragedy has struck the Lightfoot Lane, City district.
Shortly after midnight yesterday, fire destroyed three homes leaving five people homeless.
A fourth house owned by Ann Catlyn was extensively damaged by the blaze which firemen fought for more than an hour to bring under control in the densely populated area.
Anthony Bignall, his wife and 19-year-old son Anderson Holder were asleep when the fire alarm went off in the neighbourhood.
“We were sleeping,” then I heard “Sophie” shouting that the house was on fire. When I got up I saw a lot of smoke and I knew something was wrong,” Bignall told the SUNDAY SUN yesterday.
The 50-year-old handyman spoke of how he tried to save most of his possessions with the help of neighbours before fire wiped out the home his family had been sharing for the past eight years.
The flames also destroyed the homes of 31-year-old Randy Haynes and 53-year-old Cecilia Harlow. Haynes’ father Louis Mayers said his son had left home to visit a friend when he heard there was a fire in the district.Lost everything“He lost everything in the house [where] he was born and spent his entire life,” was how Mayers described the shock to his son.
None of the homes were insured and the victims were up to yesterday hoping to have some form of temporary accommodation.
City MP Patrick Todd congratulated the Barbados Fire Service for averting devastation of the district.
Todd urged people in urban populated districts to be their brothers’ keepers by forming neighbourhood watches.
Todd said both Government agencies, Urban Development Commission and the Welfare Department were putting things in place for the fire victims.
Just last Monday, misfortune struck the district when 15-year-old Kevin Stoute, a fourth-former of St George Secondary School, was struck on the head by another schoolboy and killed. (TS)
