SINGAPORE: He may have crawled through thick smoke in an attempt to break into a burning Bukit Merah flat to rescue two people trapped within. But 39-year-old Wan feels nothing but guilt.
“Because I could not save them,” he told CNA in an emotional phone interview on Thursday (Aug 14). “When I see the video (of the fire), I still want to cry; I try to talk, but I can’t.”
A 34-year-old man and a 32-year-old woman died after a fire broke out in a Housing and Development Board (HDB) flat at Block 106 Jalan Bukit Merah the day before. Sixty people were also evacuated from the affected block.
The Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) has said that preliminary findings indicate the fire could have started from a battery pack of a personal mobility device (PMD) in the living room.
When firefighters arrived, the living room and bedroom of a fourth-floor unit were on fire, and two people were found unresponsive in the kitchen. They were taken unconscious to Singapore General Hospital (SGH), where they died.
Wan, a lifting supervisor, had just got home from work at about 4pm when he saw smoke streaming from a fourth-floor unit in his block. He also spotted the woman screaming for help from one of the windows.
He declined to give his full name, saying he did not want to draw attention to himself.
For Wan, who had served in the SCDF during his National Service, instinct kicked in: He decided then and there to do everything he could to save the pair.
“My thinking is just to help them … I didn’t care about myself,” he said.
He ran up to the fourth floor, only to find the smoke too thick to pass through. On the way, he met a young man and an older neighbour, who joined him in trying to help the pair.
They hurried to the fifth floor and found a safer route to the burning unit. Armed with fire extinguishers, they dropped to all fours to avoid the smoke.
Wan then saw that the door to the unit was open, but the gate was locked. “We tried to ask them to throw the keys to us,” he said, but there was no response.
Attempts to break the lock failed, as did their bid to put out the flames with the fire extinguisher, which was “too small”, said Wan.
“We couldn’t pull them out, and that was when I said to (the young man) let’s evacuate, the smoke is too thick for us.”
As they made their way down, they saw firefighters rushing up to douse the flames. Soon after, he heard a few explosions from the unit.
Asked why he decided to risk his life, Wan played down his heroics.
“When we proceeded to the house, the fire wasn’t so big yet … when we were (in the corridor), we couldn’t see the fire,” he said.
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