Seven homes were
“completely destroyed”
and three others damaged by a
“
giant fire
”
on Sunday in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, with the city's mayor Harry Durimel denouncing the scourge of joint ownership, responsible according to him for the departure of residents. lights.
According to the Departmental Fire and Rescue Service (Sdis) of Guadeloupe, firefighters were alerted at 4:46 a.m. for a house fire on rue Raspail, near the center of Pointe-à-Pitre, which quickly spread to other buildings.
Firefighters battled the fire for several hours, with the final toll being
“seven homes completely destroyed and three impacted”
.
“Two firefighters were slightly injured in the operation (...) The dynamics of the fire were very rapid
,” Félix Anthénor Abazac, the director of Sdis, explained to AFP, specifying that the buildings were
“mainly made up of drink"
.
Rudy Razan, a witness to the scene, spoke on local radio RCI of a
“frightening spectacle”
.
“We were woken up around 4:30 a.m. and when we went out, we saw a huge fire on one of the buildings
,” he said.
The mayor of Pointe-à-Pitre, Harry Durimel, spoke in a press release released on Sunday evening of
“a giant fire”
and
“a real disaster, like on a war field”
.
He specified that
“the building in which the fire seemed to have started was at the center of a clear abandonment procedure initiated by the municipal administration”
, but that this
“was paralyzed by conflicts between co-owners”
.
The town hall will
“ask for help so that we can overcome the problems of joint ownership which are paralyzing public action in the treatment of these houses and huts
,” he added.
Joint inheritance poses a problem
Joint inheritance - the fact that the assets of an estate belong indiscriminately to all the heirs without their respective shares being materially individualized, supposed to remain temporary - regularly causes land management difficulties in Guadeloupe and overseas.
According to the National Agency for Housing Information (Anil),
“40% of private property has given rise to blocked joint ownership”
in overseas territories.
A law on joint inheritance was passed in 2018 at the initiative of Serge Letchimy, then MP for Martinique, to relax this rule, without resolving all the problems.
Pointe-à-Pitre also regularly experiences fires in old wooden houses, often abandoned.
Sunday evening, a charred body was also discovered after a fire which completely destroyed a wooden and sheet metal shed in Abymes, a town in Grande-Terre, the Pointe-à-Pitre prosecutor told AFP.