The fire department's investigation is also showing so far that it may be an overload on the shared electrical circuit. The station chief at the national fire service told us more about this case and about the dangers of getting electricity from a secondary source.
Orin Smith,,Station Chief, National Fire Service
"The national fire service received reports of a structural fire on Rose Lane Belize City, two units were dispatched to that location on arrival on scene at number 2575 Rose Lane found were two structures on a property, two wooden structure, the structure on the rear was seen fully engulfed in flames. The structure at the front had the north section engulfed in flames."
"Preliminary investigation revealed that the fire originated from the structure at the rear of the premise and no one appeared to be home at the time, a structure at the rear of the premise was receiving an electrical feed from the front structure, the fire originated in an east compartment of the rear structure and the south east of that particular apartment. The cause of the fire is still not yet determined."
Reporter
"The family they are saying it was a faulty circuit and they believe it was an electrical problem that caused the fire?"
Orin Smith:
"The investigation is leaning towards the cause being electrical, but the officers are still analyzing the data they have collected."
Reporter:
"We have often times heard the fire department speak about these illegal wirings and how it can lead to something like this. Could you talk to us about that the risk being taken by persons giving a drop of electricity to another person?"
Orin Smith:
"There is a great degree of risk involved in an electrical feed when a house I naturally wired, an electrician takes his care to calculate the electrical load the house is expected to bear, circuit breakers and wiring are sized appropriately, and the house is well grounded. When you have a drop received from a adjacent structure none of this is taken into account and often you may get a feed for a refrigerator, or maybe a TV but later on a microwave gets added, a stereo gets added, a DVD gets added so it keeps building up and then you might get another tenant gets into the same building and receives a feed from the person who was already using a feed and you end up with a number of extensions off that one feed that will create an overload at some point and starts a fire."
Neither of the Rose Lane homes was insured.
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