A BLAZE at Lot 13 Friendship, East Bank Demerara (EBD) that suddenly erupted at 11:30hrs on Sunday consumed a two-storey wooden and concrete house and left a family of five bereft of all its valuables.Residents said the Guyana Fire Service did not manage to contain the blaze until at approximately 13:00hrs.

According to Rocky Bahadur, an occupant of the gutted building, after he had finished his barbering duties and had closed his barbershop, he made his way home, only to see a cloud of smoke billowing in the air. He later learned that the house he lived in was on fire.

He explained that no one was at home at the time the fire started, and he immediately sprang into action, trying to use buckets to douse a section of the wooden step that led into the upper flat.

“Everything we own is now up in smoke. I’m talking passports with visas; foreign currency for travel that my wife and mother-in-law was supposed to use in two weeks; money that was not carried to the bank yet from the business, amongst other things that I can’t even begin to say,” Bahadur lamented.

He said family members were at a business operated at Grove, East Bank Demerara — Padma’s Creole Cuisine — when neighbours alerted them via phone that the house was on fire.