| Residents of an East Coast Demerara community sprang into action last evening when a blaze erupted at an elderly couple’s home.Ivan Kalistro, 71, and his 53-year-old wife, Nafeeza Hassan, of Lot 11 Bladen Hall, East Coast Demerara, narrowly avoided injury after the fire erupted in the bottom flat of their house last evening around 19:15 hours and quickly engulfed the entire residence.Alarmed by heavy smoke and the sight of flames, neighbours rushed out with their buckets and quickly formed a bucket brigade to save the couple’s home.However, the 25-man team only managed to save the neighbouring store. When Kaieteur News arrived on the scene,Wholesale Jerseys Chinese, scores of residents had lined the streets, trying to make sense of what had occurred.In the midst of the confusion, Kaieteur News found the elderly man sitting in a neighbour’s yard. Kalistro had burns on his back; his head had a bloody gash. Slurring, the 71-year-old man said that he and his wife were in their bedroom,Cheap Jerseys Online, conversing, when they noticed the fire.“We don’t have electricity; we use a lamp so we were in the bedroom gaffing and suddenly I see a flame in the house. It’s an old house,” related the elderly man. He said at the time they were lying on their bed located at the bottom flat of the building and the lamp was on a table in the bedroom.His wife had reportedly claimed,Cheap China Jerseys, however, that they were in the living room relaxing but the man insisted that he was lying on the bed while his wife was attempting to sweep the dust from the bed.The 71-year-old man explained, too, that he and his wife had been imbibing earlier. “We had lil ‘tups’. We does take one-one tups you know. We were in bed lying down, gaffin’ about old time stories and thing,” he said.The old man made it clear that at the time of the fire, they had stopped drinking.Though he could not ascertain whether the lamp had been the source of the fire, he said the flame spread fast and he and his wife ran to safety after their attempt to quell the fire with a bowl of water failed.The elderly man told Kaieteur News that he fell at the gate, while running to safety. He was at a loss as to what could have possibly caused the fire that destroyed the house in which they had been living for the past 30 years.Meanwhile, the couple’s neighbour, Fazal Nageer, 49,Cheap NFL Jerseys China, was thankful that the fire had not spread. Nageer, the owner of Bobby’s General Store located next door to the couple, has been operating his business there for the past 20 years.He said that when he returned from Masjid,Cheap NFL Jerseys China, he learnt that a blaze had erupted at his neighbour’s home located at the eastern side of his store.Residents who spoke to Kaieteur News were thankful for the response by the Guyana Fire Service,China Jerseys Cheap, though they claimed that it was the bucket brigade that they formed which prevented the fire from spreading to the nearby store. |
