An ex­haus­tive probe has be­gun in­to the cir­cum­stances be­hind the dev­as­tat­ing fire at Bam­boo No. 2 in Val­sayn, which re­sult­ed in the de­struc­tion of at least nine au­to­mo­tive busi­ness­es.

Fire Pre­ven­tion Of­fi­cers, along with teams of in­ves­ti­ga­tors from the Trinidad and To­ba­go Elec­tric­i­ty Com­mis­sion (T&TEC) and pri­vate in­sur­ance com­pa­nies, were seen at the site this morn­ing, tak­ing pho­tographs and gath­er­ing any ev­i­dence that would help in iden­ti­fy­ing the cause of the blaze.

FSO Forde from the Wright­son Road Fire Head­quar­ters Fire Pre­ven­tion Unit told Guardian Me­dia one huge build­ing was de­stroyed which had housed about ten dif­fer­ent busi­ness­es.  He said they were work­ing with a pre­lim­i­nary loss es­ti­mate of rough­ly $1.2 mil­lion per busi­ness.

Scores of work­ers and sev­er­al of the busi­ness own­ers al­so were on site this morn­ing but were too dis­traught to speak with the me­dia. 

How­ev­er, one work­er said while he is now out of a reg­u­lar job, he is for­tu­nate to be able to fall back on small farm­ing.

"It is sad and a lot of us lost our jobs but thank God I have my small farm­ing to fall back on," he said.

And a busi­ness own­er lament­ed the loss­es that have re­sult­ed from the fire.

"I lost mil­lions of dol­lars and I am stressed out,” he said.  “So many peo­ple out of jobs now."

The fire start­ed just af­ter 5 pm as a loud ex­plo­sion was heard com­ing from one of the busi­ness­es.  The dam­age is es­ti­mat­ed to be in the range of mil­lions of dol­lars.