04:45 AM Jul 17, 2012
SINGAPORE - The fire alarm went off as Mr Florante Mollena was surfing the Internet in his room on the ninth floor of East Village Hotel at 9am yesterday, but he brushed it off thinking it was just a drill.
He then looked out of the window and saw billowing black smoke. "I panicked … I quickly packed my things and ran down the stairs with another five or six hotel guests," said Mr Mollena, a 38-year-old Filipino who was in Singapore on a business trip.
The fire at the former Paramount Hotel created a black cloud of smoke so immense it could be seen several kilometres away at the Central Business District. It took five hours to put out the fire.
Narrowly avoiding being caught in the building while the fire raged was Bangladeshi construction worker Mohammad Nazrul Islam. He and his 15 colleagues could not enter the building to do renovation work when they reached at around 8.40am.
"I come to work, I see smoke come out of the building," said the 32-year-old, who was supposed to start work at 9.30am.
Lieutenant-Colonel Abdul Razak, Singapore Civil Defence Force's (SCDF) Public Affairs Director, told Channel NewsAsia the blaze was one of the more challenging fires the SCDF has faced in recent years.
The SCDF was informed of the fire at 9.06am, and arrived within eight minutes with 19 SCDF vehicles and 80 SCDF personnel. The fire was in the basement of the front block - a retail annex - and involved vast quantities of polystyrene boards and other construction materials including flammable liquid. It did not spread to the main building.
Three main challenges to the operation were the raging fire at the basement, the zero visibility for the firefighters and the difficulty in getting to the fire in the basement due to the stacking of construction materials.
Fifty personnel were evacuated in a search-and-rescue operation. The SCDF said 11 were injured: Two SCDF personnel, five adults and four children.
A Singapore General Hospital spokesperson said seven of the 11 were discharged yesterday. The remaining four are in the high dependency ward but their conditions are stable.
Mr Raphael Saw, Chief Operating Officer for the Hospitality Business Group at Far East Organization, said the hotel has offered guests assistance in medical treatments, arranged for alternative accommodation for guests and helped to facilitate their ongoing travel arrangements, he added.
Marine Parade GRC Member of Parliament Goh Chok Tong visited the site yesterday evening to assess the damage. On his MParader Facebook page, he thanked the SCDF team, whom he described as "brave men".
Source: http://www.todayonline.com/Singapore/EDC120717-0000028/Fire-breaks-out,-11-injured
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