CHENNAI: Two persons, including a woman, were injured when an LPG cylinder burst following a fire in a house at Nammalwarpet, Otteri, on Thursday morning.
The fire is suspected to have been caused by an electrical short-circuit. The injured were identified as one B Prakash (30) and Y Sugamani (52).
Fire broke out in a room occupied by four persons from Uttar Pradesh, who were working as carpenters in the city for more than four years. The four, Rohit, Mukundan, Jaswanth and Deepak, had left for work around 8.30am, and the house was locked at the time of the incident, neighbours said.
“I was drying clothes on the second floor when a woman from the adjacent building alerted me about thick smoke coming from a room behind my house. Within minutes, fire spread to a hut on the terrace of the next building. I took my partially-blind husband and immediately rushed downstairs,” said Savithri, a neighbour.
When the room caught fire, the owner of a neighbouring building, Sugamani, tried to douse it with water. While she was filling water, an LPG cylinder burst, the impact of which brought down a compound wall and a portion of it fell on Sugamani. “Sugamani fell and hit her head on the steps and suffered an injury,” said Padmavathi, a resident.