The Tribune

By EARYEL BOWLEG

Tribune Staff Reporter

ebowleg@tribunemedia.net

A DAY after buying household items to prepare for Christmas, Danielle Delancy and her family were left with nothing but smoke and ash after fire tore through their Eleuthera home on Monday, destroying the house that had been in their family for more than three decades.

The blaze, reported shortly before 12.30pm in Current, Eleuthera, fully engulfed the residence before police arrived, despite frantic efforts by neighbours and volunteers to control the flames. A nearby garage and an abandoned vehicle were also damaged. No injuries were reported.

The house, owned by Ms Delancy’s grandfather and home to seven family members, had stood for more than 30 years. At the time of the fire, four people were inside: Ms Delancy’s 33-year-old brother and her three children, aged 11, nine and seven. Ms Delancy and her grandfather were at work.

The family is still trying to determine how the fire started.

Ms Delancy said she first learned something was wrong through a confusing phone call from her son’s grandmother.

“She said she had the children, they safe,” she said. “So I was like, ‘safe from what?’ So she was like, the fire. She said y’all house on fire. I say ‘our house on what?”

By the time she reached the property, the scene was unrecognisable.

“Everything was in ‘black smoke,” she said.

“I thought about where I was gonna live and how this happened and everything blowed up before the Christmas time.”

She said the loss was particularly painful given how recently she had begun rebuilding her life there.

“I just came back there about two to three years ago, was just trying to get everything sorted, just buying stuff to start adding more in there for the Christmas and everything, like literally the day before that.”

In the aftermath, Ms Delancy’s grandfather stayed with his daughter, while other family members sought temporary shelter at the government-run children’s home on Current Island. A fire relief fundraiser has since been organised to assist the family, with organisers seeking toiletries, school supplies, shoes and bottled water.

Beyond the immediate loss, the fire has once again exposed a long-running grievance in north Eleuthera: the absence of a local fire truck.

The nearest fire truck responded from Palmetto Point, about 50 miles away. Residents said the vehicle was donated by American homeowners on the island.

Ms Delancy described the situation as “almost ridiculous”, saying the lack of basic emergency infrastructure compounded the family’s hardship.

“There's no vehicles running, so you have to walk like four to five miles before you even get into the settlement,” she said. “When it is raining and stuff, we gotta walk there. So now I'm staying there, and I gotta walk there with grocery, walk there with clothes, walk with whatever, because you can't get across there with the vehicles, and there's no shops over there. I just don’t understand.”

Neighbour Philip Nielly, who lives a few houses away, said he watched the fire unfold and feared it would spread.

He recalled shouting when he realised something was wrong, then seeing smoke outside before flames took hold. By the time residents reacted, the fire was already intense.

“Everybody pitched in,” Mr Nielly said. “We still don't have a fire truck here in north Eleuthera which is desperately needed.”

“One of the guys, he has like a little trailer outfit that he bought himself just to help people out with a 500-gallon tank. He brought that in as fast as he could, and he was able to maintain the fire just in that area. We kept the fire just right there.”

Mr Nielly said the fear was personal. He lost his own home to fire in Current in 2017, one of three houses destroyed in that blaze, and said it took nearly two years to rebuild.

He said the problem extends beyond Eleuthera and reflects a wider failure to equip Family Islands with basic emergency services.

“They really dropped the ball on the fire truck situation here in the Eleuthera, and every other out Island is in the same condition,” Mr Nielly said. “So when people's houses is burning down, it's like you can't even save it.”