Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies stu­dents seek­ing to ac­cess ser­vices pro­vid­ed at the Lloyd Brath­waite Build­ing can now ac­cess them on­line.

This af­ter a fire par­tial­ly dam­aged the build­ing at the St Au­gus­tine Cam­pus on Thurs­day night.

In an up­date on the is­sue, UWI said the build­ing re­mains closed but arrange­ments are now in place to en­sure the ser­vices pro­vid­ed there would not be in­ter­rupt­ed.

“All ser­vices of­fered by the de­part­ments with­in the build­ing (Ad­mis­sions, Records, Stu­dent Ac­counts, Ex­am­i­na­tions, Grad­u­ate Stud­ies) are to con­tin­ue to be de­liv­ered on­line and will not be ac­ces­si­ble in per­son for at least an­oth­er week,” UWI said.

“We are in­deed ex­treme­ly thank­ful that the dam­age sus­tained was large­ly con­tained with­in an es­ti­mat­ed 1000 sq. ft. stor­age room area and that no per­sons were in­jured, as a re­sult of this in­ci­dent. No stu­dent or sen­si­tive records were stored in that area of the build­ing and there­fore no such doc­u­ments were lost.”

The uni­ver­si­ty as­sured it will pro­vide an­oth­er up­date clos­er to the end of next week, as they have to turn their at­ten­tion to ad­vanc­ing the di­ag­nos­tic, clean­ing and re­pair work re­quired to re­store the fa­cil­i­ty for use by staff, stu­dents, ap­pli­cants and oth­er key com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers.

UWI Stu­dent Guild pres­i­dent Kobe Nathan Sandy told the Guardian Me­dia on Thurs­day night that he was not aware if stu­dent records were dam­aged. “I’m sure if there’s any dam­age it would be re­port­ed to the stu­dents and staff and if so, what are the ac­tions to be tak­en,” Sandy said.

Smoke was de­tect­ed from the build­ing just af­ter 7 pm on Thurs­day. Fire­fight­ers were even­tu­al­ly able to con­tain the blaze and are con­tin­u­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tions to de­ter­mine the cause.