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Father burnt while trying to rescue kids from Lusignan blaze
A Lusignan family of nine had their Christmas plans shattered by a devastating fire that destroyed their two-flat wooden house around midnight Saturday.
Sebastien displays his scorched back.
The fire which started just before midnight, quickly engulfed the house at Lot 99 Lusignan Pasture, East Coast Demerara, disturbing the peaceful rest of Patrick Sebastian and his family.
By the time a fire tender from Georgetown arrived, it was only to douse the embers.
Sebastian himself sustained burns while trying to rescue two of his daughters from the burning building and had to receive treatment at the Georgetown Hospital.
He recovered enough to revisit the site yesterday where he spoke to this newspaper in the presence of his teary eyed wife and daughters.
Sebastian could not say what caused the fire but he recalled that he and his family turned into bed at around 21:30 hours on Saturday.
He and his wife occupied a bedroom on the bottom flat while the children, including two nieces, slept upstairs.
He said that just before midnight, one of his nieces hurried downstairs and aroused them, screaming that the mattress in her room was on fire.
Sebastian said he scrambled out of bed and went to investigate.
“Now they say that the mattress on fire so I come out and open the door and pick up a bucket of water fuh go upstairs. While going up, I realized that I got to get the kids dem out.”
He said that as he was heading upstairs towards the room where the fire had started, two other children who were in the other room were already making their way to safety.
“Dey push past me and I say ‘Go!’ because the place was smoking. When I go up, de whole upstairs on fire, all over. So come I get burn (in my back) because when I see de fire and I go fuh throw de water, de fire come to me like this, so rather than tek it in me face, I turn. So I just throw de bucket and I come out,” Sebastien explained.
So intense was the blaze that the family had no time to save anything.
“Fifteen minutes, eight million dollars gone. Dat is loss of the house plus other valuables,” the house owner said.
He told Kaieteur News that he was living at the house since 2012 and his dream of a Merry Christmas 2015 with his family is shattered.
What is left of the house.
Sebastien had planned to have a barbeque for his daughters on Boxing Day, but he is now faced with the task of finding alternative accommodation for his entire family.
He is upset that one online news outfit published that the fire was started by two children playing with matches.
“Come on man, twelve o’clock in the night, will two kids be playing with matches?” he asked.
“Dem two girls, (who occupied the bedroom where the fire started), when you see dem hit pon the bed, they forget whether is day or night,” he stated.
Sebastien said that he has no problem with the response of the fire service to the incident and is anxiously awaiting the report from their investigations.
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