‘I couldn’t sleep thinking of the victims and their families,’ says Kaki Bukit fire witness

SINGAPORE – She had just returned from the coffee shop slightly before 1pm when she saw smoke billowing from the top of her neighbour’s unit at Synergy@KB.

Ms Vina Tai’s car workshop, on the fifth floor of the industrial building at 25 Kaki Bukit Road 4, is next door to a signage company that was ravaged by a blaze on Sept 19, resulting in the deaths of two men.

She quickly alerted the police and Singapore Civil Defence Force to the fire.

As the fire grew, six staff from signage company Amen International waited anxiously outside the unit. Ms Tai said she saw that workers from other units had gathered on a narrow road outside the units.

Her voice trembling as she spoke to The Straits Times at her shop on Sept 20, Ms Tai said: “People were still standing around as black smoke filled half of the fifth floor.

“In the chaos, a staff member from the carpentry shop told me that two persons were trapped.

“It broke my heart when he said (one of the two people’s) last words were, ‘There’s too much smoke, I can’t breathe’.”

Subsequent calls to that person went unanswered. Ms Tai, 31, said she did not know the men who died.

In that time, witnesses heard four to five explosions, apparently from inside Amen International, before they were told to evacuate the fifth floor.

The two victims, aged 51 and 65, were found unconscious on the premises of a furniture carpentry business across from Amen International.

They were friends of the business owner, and had gone there to meet him for lunch. They were in his office as he was running late, Chinese news daily Lianhe Zaobao reported on Sept 20.

The firefighters performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation on the two men, and they were taken unconscious to Changi General Hospital. They later died from their injuries, the police said.

The authorities have interviewed staff from Amen International.

While investigations into the cause of the blaze are ongoing, Shin Min Daily News reported that it may have started when a printing machine in Amen International caught fire.

Ms Tai said: “I couldn’t sleep thinking of the deceased and their families. It happened so fast and there was nothing we could do.

“As we made our escape, one of the female staff of Amen International was visibly shaken and couldn’t stop crying.”

Workers were allowed to return to the building in the late afternoon, after waiting more than two hours.

Fortunately for Ms Tai, her workshop was untouched by the fire.

At the shop across from her unit, workers were seen on Sept 20 mopping up water on their premises and throwing away damaged wooden boards in the afternoon, when ST visited the building.

The empty Amen International unit was soot-filled and strewn with charred items such as tables and cupboards.

At a carpentry shop a few doors away, a worker recalled how three of them were forced to leave their unit in a hurry.

Pointing to soot left on the ceiling of his unit, Mr Hong Koh Lieng, 63, said: “I was asleep at lunchtime and I woke up only because of the thick smoke. I alerted my boss and we all left immediately. Luckily, none of us was hurt.”

ST has contacted Amen International for comment.