Man jumps out of 2nd-floor flat window to escape blaze
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
A man in his 30s leapt out of his second-storey flat in Yishun to escape a fire on Sunday afternoon.
A cleaner from Bangladesh, Mr Hamid, who goes by one name, told The Straits Times that he had tried to break the man's fall with a discarded sofa after hearing him cry for help.
"I saw him dangling outside the window so I tried to do whatever I could to help him," said the 34-year-old.
"But by the time the sofa was moved, he had fallen to the ground."
The Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) said a person with injuries was taken to Khoo Teck Puat Hospital.
The SCDF was alerted at 1.50pm to the fire, which involved the contents of the kitchen, at Block 512A Yishun Street 51.
About 50 people had evacuated their homes prior to the arrival of the firefighters, it added.
Yesterday, seven friends of the injured man spent about eight hours cleaning his three-room flat.
One of them, a housewife who wanted to be known only as Madam Ida, 40, said her friend, a delivery rider, never hesitated to help others, no matter how far away they were.
All 12 storeys above the second-floor flat also bore marks of the fire.
Among those most affected was resident M. Lum, 27, who is renting the third-storey flat just above the unit.
The human resource executive said: "I was woken up by the smell of smoke when the fire happened on Sunday. I then heard a loud sound. The smoke became too much so my husband and I rushed downstairs. We stopped for a few minutes outside the second-storey unit to check if our neighbour was home, but no one answered the door."
The heat from the fire was so intense that it melted her air-conditioner compressor and blackened her kitchen and service yard.
"My husband and I were planning to move to a Build-To-Order flat next month," she said, adding that the flat belonged to her uncle.
"And now we have to deal with additional bills for repairing the damage because we just found out that the flat's insurance has expired."
SCDF is investigating the cause of the fire.
