A shopfitter jumped out of a window in a desperate attempt to escape a fire in a student residence under construction at the Durban University of Technology.
|||Durban - A shopfitter has been injured after jumping out of a window in a desperate attempt to escape a fire in a student residence under construction at the Durban University of Technology.
Durban central fire station division commander, Trevor Stevens, said the man suffered severe burns in the blaze on Thursday afternoon.
Dr Gopalkrishna Chetty, special assistant to the vice-chancellor of the DUT, confirmed the fire broke out in the Winterton block of the new student village under construction on the Steve Biko Campus.
Stevens said another worker had run to the station, about 100m down the road, to raise the alarm about the fire.
The room on fire was one in which the workers stored their equipment, including paint, paint thinner and their clothes.
“There were two guys in the room, one jumped out of the window on to a ledge, but the other was trapped,†said Stevens.
Firefighters rescued the man and put out the fire which was confined to the one room.
Their colleagues told the Daily News they had heard a commotion while working in the same building.
When they rushed out, they saw the fire and a colleague leaping out of the window on to a concrete slab that serves as a sort of cover to the ground floor of the building.
Others pulled him to safety through the window on the first floor. A student’s room and a portion of the passage was damaged.
Chetty said: ”The exact cause of the fire is unknown at this stage. Only when the injured workers are interviewed can the exact cause of the fire be established.”
Daily News