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The chief executive officer of Fiji freight company Williams and Gosling has expressed regret at not having a fire alarm installed at its main Suva warehouse destroyed in an early morning blaze this week.
“The damage from the fire could have been minimised if we had installed a fire alarm monitoring system,” said Fernando Lobendahn.
He said the company is awaiting full details of complaints from customers before finalising the cost of damage to the warehouse in Walu Bay.
Lobendahn said the company will have to look into the cost of shipment and freight plus the value of cargo destroyed in the fire before a figure is released.
“This is a loss for both sides - the company and the customers,” Lobendahn told FijiLive.
“We’ve lost a lot of things and we’re waiting for the customers to come in and lodge complaints about their cargo. From (their) complaints we’ll be able to work out how much we’ve lost in the fire,” he added.
The fire which started at about 5.30pm on Monday was spotted by a Suva firefighter an hour later. The heat generated from the warehouse was so intense that firefighters were not able to enter the warehouse, the National Fire Authority said.
The NFA was critical of the fact that there was no security guard or fire alarm to raise the alert.
Firefighters were eventually able to save three Williams and Gosling cargo trucks, three full container loads of goods and three brand new Fiji Electricity Authority transformers stored within the warehouse.
