BALLANTYNE’S FIRE INQUIRY

Press, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 25428, 26 February 1948, Page 8

BALLANTYNE’S FIRE INQUIRY

Officer’s Experiences In Right-of-Way

DOORWAY NEAR CELLAR STAIRS ENTERED

development in the fire brigade section of the incidents at Ballantyne’s fire at yesterday’s sitting of the Royai Commission of Inquiry was the evidence of Senior Station Officer Charles Ernest Warner Stevenson that he discovered the entrance to the shop from Congreve’s right-of-way, but that he failed by a yard to find the stairway leading down to the cellar.

“As I know now, if I had turned to the right I would have gone down the stairway,” Officer Stevenson said when relating how, with a respirator mask on, he groped cautiously on hands and knees in thick, hot smoke for two or three steps through an opening in the northern wall of the right-of-way which was found by his branchman.

Questioned by Mr G. G. G. Watson (counsel for the Crown) as to why no reference to his discovery and actions in the doorway had been made in two earlier statements to the Crown representative, through the Fire Board, Officer Stevenson said that he had given the information to the board’s representative but that details were omitted from his statement.

Denying that the time he spent in the alleyway from soon after the arrival of the brigade until, exhausted by smoke, he withdrew to Colombo street, was spent ineffectively, Officer Stevenson said he was looking all the time for the entrance to the cellar. It was his duty to try to locate the entrance and the fire. He said that water was not played into the opening. “If in my judgment a delivery should have been used, it would have been used,” he said.

Officer Stevenson was the only witness heard yesterday. He was in the witness box for 5 hours 20 minutes.