EIGHT people, including four children, are now homeless after their four-bedroom wooden house on Chestnut Lane in Denham Town, Kingston, was destroyed by fire yesterday.

The house was not insured.

The fire, which started after 10:00 am, also damaged two neighbouring houses in the tenement yard.

“Nuttin nuh save,” 54-year-old Elizabeth Gordon said through her tears.

“Is a piece a clothes me a look for fi go bathe and put on because me lose everything,” Gordon told the Observer yesterday, as she searched desperately through her charred belongings. Her hands were blackened by the debris.

There was a single glimmer of hope when the Gordon family found a scorched bag that was used to store important documents. The family recovered some soaked birth certificates, as well as a few partially burnt ones.

“Me was at me shop round a the front, when me hear them call out seh smoke coming out of mi house,” she recalled.

“When me reach close to the house me couldn’t go any further because me allergic to smoke, so me call out to them fi lick down the light wire so that it nuh spread to the other house dem,” Gordon told the Observer.

She was forced to watch helplessly as the house burned. Neighbours poured a few buckets of water on the fire before the firefighters arrived.

District officer, Barrington Marshall at the York Park Fire Station in downtown Kingston, said the call for assistance came in at about 10:59 am, and the firefighters arrived at the house within a minute of receiving the call.

“It took us about 20 minutes to get the fire under control before we extinguished it,” he said. “We also had to extinguish one other house which caught fire,” Marshall said. Only a bedroom window was damaged in the blaze.

Shinelle Campbell, whose house is also adjacent to Gordon’s house, said the fire also damaged her roof.

“It not really bad, is only the back part burn,” Campbell said.

As a precautionary measure, other neighbours removed their furniture from inside their houses and placed them out into the street.

Meanwhile, the Gordon family is accusing a neighbour of starting the fire. They claim that the neighbour was burning garbage nearby, and the fire spread to a nearby tree and to the house. However, the police have not yet determined the cause of the fire.