INVESTIGATORS believe they have found the point of origin of the fire that gutted three businesses at the Globe City Plaza in Chase Village on Tuesday.
However, they say it is still too early to establish a cause, as they continue to remove rubble from the site.
Yesterday, acting Deputy Chief Fire Officer Ansar Ali told the Express a team of fire officers, as well as members of the Trinidad and Tobago Defence Force and personnel from the Ministry of Works, had returned to the complex as the investigation continues.
‘We are working on making a coordinated effort to remove heavy debris from what is considered to be possibly the area of origin to excavate and try to find the source of the fire,’ he said during a telephone interview.
As this activity continued, he said, there was a fire truck on standby at the site to extinguish embers.
‘You can imagine the amount of debris and the amount of items that they had stored in the building. We will still have smouldering spots under the debris, so we need to keep it cool whilst the officers are doing the investigation,’ he added.
Ali said he could not provide a timeline for the conclusion of the investigation.
He noted there were issues of safety for staff, as the site was unstable. ‘There are 12-inch beams that go from the eastern side to the western side of the building; the purlins on it are attached to the wall, and if we move the beams, the walls will collapse, so we need to be meticulous in what we do and we need to be careful for our own safety,’ he said.
He added that investigators were continuing the recording of witness reports, as statements and evidence were being reviewed. ‘We’re trying to answer the who, the what, the when, the where, the why, and the how,’ he said.
Adding that business at the complex remained non-functional, he said over 50% of the building was saved during the nine-hour firefighting effort on Tuesday.
This, he said, had saved the hardware at the front of the building; the mall on the western end of the building; and the foam factory at the back of the building.
Ali said while an initial assessment had valued the damage to the building at around $4 million, a later review will provide an approximate cost to the contents destroyed during the blaze.
He reiterated the need for both fire inspection at commercial settings, as well as adequate fire-suppression equipment, which would have been used as an initial response.
‘If they had training, if they had extinguishers, they could have done something in the incipient stages, and that would have helped immensely,’ Ali stated.
On Tuesday around 9.20 a.m., a fire broke out on the eastern section of the plaza, gutting three businesses.
The firefighting effort, which engaged both the Central and South divisions, ended around 7 p.m., with responding officers preventing its spread to the rest of the complex.
The plaza is estimated to host 15 businesses in total.
There have been no reported fatalities from the incident.
Nancie Motsinger
Read More