Fire leaves 17 family members homeless
FIRE yesterday destroyed a seven-bedroom house at 2H First Avenue, in Vineyard Town, leaving 17 members of the Samuels family homeless.
The house was first occupied by an earlier generation of the family in 1972, and remained a family home until it was destroyed by ire yesterday.
“Nothing don’t save, everything gone. Eight beds, four fridges, five TV’s, five what-nots, four DVD players, three dressers, three chest of drawers, two stoves. You name it, we lose it,” Anthony Samuels told the Observer yesterday.
Family members said the blaze began at exactly two o’ clock in the morning, but denied knowing how it started.
Fortunately, after waking up to the heat of the fire burning inside the house, all 17 family members, including a one-year-old girl and a two-month-old boy, managed to get safely out of the house.
“We just wake up and see the fire and run out of the house. We couldn’t save nothing,” Samuels told the Observer.
“See what me save here, the clothes on my back,” another family member was overheard saying, as he gestured to his bare chest and a pair of black jeans cut off at the knees.
The Fire Brigade was alerted by residents close to the Samuels’ home and a unit each from the Rollington Town and York Park fire stations extinguished the blaze.
All hope is not lost for the family, however, as other members in the community have since yesterday morning been helping to clear away the debris caused by the fire, and to transform the remains of the house into a shelter.
“The people are trying to see if they can give us a little [help]. We want to put up a little shelter. We don’t have anywhere else to go so we just going to have to rebuild it,” Clair Samuels told the Observer.
Currently, the house has no roof and the walls, which have been all but stripped completely of paint, are severely weakened. Yesterday, several men were seen using shovels to clear piles of ashes and other debris from the floor of the house.
For some of the family members the destruction of the house was yet another blight on the family as it came two weeks after the death of the family matriarch Enid Turner. Turner, 77, according to Clair, was the person who purchased the house along First Avenue in the 1970s and allowed the family to take root in the community.
“[Our] mother died three weeks ago and then this go happen to us. This come een like a curse,” Anthony Samuels said.
