WEEKEND FIRES

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVI, Issue 4, 5 July 1943, Page 3

WEEKEND FIRES

TWO PEOPLE INJURED

Extensive damage was done to a large two-storey brick building at Miramar, belonging to the Wellington Gas Company, by a fire which broke out shortly after 1 o'clock this morning. The building is lined and partitioned" with wood and it contains men's dressing, drying, and shower rooms, storeroom, laboratory, and office. The fire began in an upstairs room used as a drying room in which a coke fire is always burning, and it started either through clothes being left too close to the fire or through a defective hearth. The Gas Company men were working in another part of the yard at the time, and the. fire was noticed first by a nightwatchman of an oil company's installation nearby. He gave the alarm by telephone, and machines from Miramar, Wellington South, and Central responded. When the firemen arrived there were flames leaping through the roof. Four lines of hose were used to extinguish the fire, which did a lot of damage to the top of the building. Some of the ground floor rooms were damaged by water, though salvage sheets spread by the firemen did much to lessen the damage in the store and the laboratory. Sparks from a fire set alight to a mattress in a flat occupied by Mrs. I. Darrachott, at 201 The Terrace, shortly after 1 p.m. yesterday, and articles in the room were damaged by fire before the firemen using bucket pumps extinguished the flames. NEXT TO FIEE In a«fire which occurred in a house next to the Central Fire Station yesterday morning two people received burns which necessitated their removal to hospital. They were Mr. A. W. Burnett, the owner and occupier of the house, and Miss M. Lothian, a visitor. Mrs. Burnett escaped unharmed. This afternoon the hospital j reported that Mr. Burnett's condition was improving and that Miss Lothian's condition was satisfactory. The fire was noticed shortly before 9 a.m. yesterday by a fireman at the Central Fire Station and three engines left at once for the house, which is at the back of the station, at 16 Rox- j burgh Street. The fire apparently started in the, sitting-room on the ground floor at the front, and it quickly spread through the open door to the passage and up the stairs. The house is an old wooden one. All three oc-; cupants were trapped upstairs by the spreading flames. Mi*. Burnett fought his way downstairs and a fireman kicked in the front door and pulled him out. Miss Lothian jumped from- a window about ten feet to the ground, and Mrs. Burnett left the house by a fire escape at the rear. Fire severely damaged the front of the house on the ground floor and heat and smoke damaged the upper rooms.