Two people were seriously injured in a house fire in Luyanó, in the Havana municipality of Diez de Octubre, early Tuesday morning.
According to the residents of the place to this newspaper, the fire started at four in the morning due to the combustion of an electric motorcycle that was charging. The flames reached a second motorcycle and several fuel drums that the family had stored, which reduced the interior of the house to ashes at high speed. “Even the floor rose,” testified a neighbor.
In the building, located on Calle Arango, between Manuel Pruna and Rosa Enríquez, were the owner, Fidel González, well known in the neighborhood for working at a nearby carpentry shop, his three sons, Denny (15 years old), David and Daniel (jimaguas), and his wife, a Cuban-American visiting Havana.
The incident occurred when Daniel, who works as a taxi driver, was taking a bath after arriving from boating. “The boy felt an explosion and when one of the motorcycles came out he was on fire,” says another neighbor. “He alerted everyone in the house, who were inside their air-conditioned rooms.”
One of the two family dogs, Floppy, was left inside the house and had to be rescued, with injuries, by a firefighter.
Relatives of the family sent a request via Facebook to all the acquaintances to collect help, because, they regret, they lost “everything: TV, washing machine, refrigerator, kitchen”
Daniel himself was the one who ended up with serious burns. Both he and his wife, who inhaled too much carbon dioxide, were admitted to the Miguel Enríquez hospital, known as La Benéfica.
Relatives of the family sent a request via Facebook to all the acquaintances to collect help, because, they regret, they lost “everything: TV, washing machine, refrigerator, kitchen.”
Daniel González, say the neighbors, was planning to go to the United States by “the route of the volcanoes” (Nicaragua).
Fires due to electric motorcycle explosions are frequent in Cuba. One of the last reported occurred last June in the municipality of Cerroalso in Havana, and destroyed 12 motorcycles and two cars.
Last year, a 60-year-old woman and one of her seven-year-old grandsons died in a fire caused by the explosion of a motorine in Sancti Spíritus, and, months later, another 19-year-old girl died in a similar incident in the city of Matanzas.
On the other hand, the storage of fuel, which in the case of Luyanó aggravated the accident, is also something common on the Island. In many cases, they are used to run electric generators, the alternative that some families have to daily blackouts. .
In his case, the González family saved it for the taxi that Daniel operated, given the increasingly frequent fuel shortage in the Cupet.
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