It took 110 firefighters 10 hours to subdue a massive blaze that gutted the Goodyear Tyre Distribution Centre and destroyed a section of the adjoining Queen’s Warehouse on Spanish Town Road in St Andrew between Thursday night and yesterday morning.

According to District Officer Emeleo Ebanks, public relations officer for the Fire Brigade, the fire, which started shortly after 8:00 pm Thursday, originated both in the Queen’s Warehouse and the tyre distribution centre. However, he said that it took firefighters an hour-and-a-half to contain the fire in a section of the Queen’s Warehouse, which stored seized goods that were about to be discarded. The blaze in the Goodyear warehouse, which stores mostly tyres, was more challenging.

“The Goodyear section was the one that gave us the real problems, we had to cut through the roof and we came upon steel shutters when we tried to go through the entrance,” said Ebanks. “That took up a lot of time, and so it took four hours for us to extinguish that one.”

Ebanks said 13 fire trucks and two Rapid Response units from fire stations as far as Stony Hill and Spanish Town were brought in to help contain the blaze. The firefighters used ladders to climb atop the building with their hoses to access the zinc roof to extinguish the fire.

Yesterday, Cynthia Jonas, manager of the Goodyear facility, who was obviously still shaken by the incident, told the Observer that firefighters were still conducting cooling down operations and so the cause of the fire had not been determined, neither had the losses been ascertained.

However, on Thursday night, a frantic Jonas had told the Observer that thousands of tyres were stored in the warehouse, in addition to tubes, forklifts, palette riders, machines and computers. “This will affect sales tremendously. This is the only Goodyear warehouse in the island and we distribute islandwide,” she said.

Additionally, Byran Young, chairman of Tyre Sales, the company which distributes the tyres on behalf of Goodyear, told the Observer that the warehouse had about three months’ supply of tyres.

On Thursday night, as the fire spread through the warehouse, employees were seen trekking back and forth hurriedly with computers and documents that they were able to recover from the Goodyear administrative office, which was in total darkness, but not damaged by the fire.

Other employees watched helplessly as fire billowed from the roof of the warehouse.

“Right now, me tun fool because me out of job tomorrow and work so hard fi get,” a worried employee said.

Another female employee was overheard saying that her books that she needed for exams were lost in the fire.

“Me nuh know what me going to do because me book them burn up,” she said.

As the firefighters worked feverishly to battle the blaze, a large crowd gathered outside the gates of the complex, which was guarded by armed policemen. By 9:00 pm, the fire in the warehouse had begun to spread further and clouds of smoke mixed with tiny sparks could be seen billowing from the building.

Large charred particles that fell to the ground in flurries covered most of the rear section of the complex. The smell of burning rubber also filled the air. By 10:45 pm, a fire truck referred to as the snorkel unit (used to access high-rise buildings) was brought in to assist with the blaze.