A fire broke out at the Queen’s Park Oval on Monday morning, causing damage to the top tier of the Shell/Scotiabank Stand on the northwestern side of the Oval.
Despite this, President of the Queen’s Park Cricket Club, Dr Nigel Camacho is assuring it will not affect any upcoming matches at the venue, including the Caribbean Premier League later this year.
Smoke was seen emanating from the top tier of the Shell/Scotiabank Stand at the Queen’s Park Oval around 10:30 on Monday morning. The fire is said to have started in the Shell Corporate Box, which according to President of the Queen’s Park Cricket Club, Nigel Camacho, suffered from “substantial damage.”
“Officer Sampson said there’s still some heat around, so they’re continuing to investigate, that they may actually be some fire left in the air condition ducting. So they’re taking no chances and they’re actually doing a piece by piece search of the area. So I want to actually congratulate the fire services for the very rapid response they were here within minutes of GM Mohammed calling fire services and they were here quickly and on the scene and got things quickly under control and probably saved a lot of damage from happening.”
At least three fire tenders were called to the scene, with a WASA water truck also called in as a backup.
Dr Camacho said the fire was mostly contained to the Shell Corporate Box, with some damage to NLCB’s Corporate Booth.
“No injuries, nothing to report. The place was empty. And it seems that the fire started and it started at around 10:30 looks like and it quickly spread into air condition ducting and it was quickly brought under control by the Fire Service. (Contained to the top floor) Just to the top floor, in fact, it’s limited more or less in the area of the Shell corporate box. So there’s a little lateral spread to the NLCB box and there’s no damage to the Scotia.”
The QPCC President though assured that the fire would not affect any upcoming matches at the Oval, including the Caribbean Premier League later this year.
“No, no, no, that’s very far from that. There is substantial damage to one of the Corporate booths but it doesn’t affect anything much you know, and I think that they will have to do their own assessment and determine, you know, how they’re going to get things repaired.”
As for the damages to the booths, he said that will be taken up following the investigation from fire officials.
“Until the investigative work is done and they actually determine cause of fire, then it will be up to the speculators to look and see how insurance will handle that different areas from the damage.”