The Sacred Heart fire
Editorial
Stabroek News
December 28, 2004
Christmas Day opened badly. The destruction of the Sacred Heart Church could not have been worse news, not just for the Roman Catholic community, but for the whole of Guyana. A listed building, the church was a landmark in Main Street and made a unique contribution to the architectural character of central Georgetown. And now it has gone.
It was originally erected as a place of worship for the Portuguese community, where they had a priest who could speak their language, and where they could participate in rituals whose characteristics had the familiar ring of their Madeiran homeland. The building was begun in 1859, and was completed in 1861, the inaugural mass in the church being held on Christmas Eve. The main structure was designed by its first priest, Father Schembri, and while its exterior was somewhat plain, the interior was enlivened by a wealth of detail which recalled the churches of the Iberian peninsula. The historian James Rodway said that a visitor should go and see Sacred Heart when it had been decorated for a feast of the Church; "at such times," he wrote, "it was one of the sights of Georgetown."
A little over a decade after the opening, the exterior received a face-lift from none other than Cesar Castellani, the talented Maltese architect attached to the Public Works Department, whose vision had such an impact on the face of the late nineteenth-century capital. His contribution was the facade of the church, which he designed and whose construction he supervised in 1872. Rodway quoted Father Scoles - the architect of City Hall - as saying it was "the finest ecclesiastical specimen of the Italian style in Demerara." Castellani's great creations have been particularly unfortunate: the Catholic Cathedral burned down in 1913, the Palms was left to fall to ruins under the PNC government, and now the Sacred Heart Church has been consumed by flames.
When a building like this goes, there is no replacing it. Neither will anyone be able to replace all the church records and documents dating back to the 1860s which went at the same time. In a very real sense, we have lost a part of our history for ever. All that can be said is that after all the talk about historical tourism and the like, we still are not doing the practical things which are necessary to preserve our material heritage.
The church in its innocence seems to have been singularly ill-equipped to respond to a fire; where, for example, were the fire extinguishers or even buckets of sand which could conceivably have outed the flames in the crib where the problem originated? Most of our heritage buildings are at high risk of fire, not simply because they are constructed of wood, but because in many cases that wood is pitch pine which is highly combustible.
In other countries, listed buildings are equipped with sprinkler systems and the like, although it is unlikely that churches here would have the financial resources to install sophisticated devices. However, through the mediation of the National Trust, the Guyana Fire Service (GFS) should be required to do a survey of all historical structures, and give advice on fire protection. At the very least these buildings should have a sufficient number of strategically placed extinguishers, as well as buckets of sand.
The critical point about the Sacred Heart fire was not that the edifice burnt because a neighbouring building was engulfed in flames; it burnt because nobody had the means at hand to respond to a localized outbreak within the church itself, as a consequence of which a major conflagration was triggered.
The performance of the GFS to the disaster has been questioned. While the fire chief has said that his officers responded as soon as they received the message, witnesses claim that there was a considerable time-lag between the alerting of the fire service, and the arrival of the tenders. Were there enough officers on duty on Christmas Day to provide an adequate response?
Furthermore, bystanders were not impressed by the GFS performance at the scene. Some witnesses said that the officers did not appear to have the means at their disposal to cope with a blaze of this scale, the water running impotently from their hoses over the street rather than spewing with force onto the flames. When will the Government wake up to the realization that in a wooden city a properly equipped (and trained) fire service is not a luxury, it is a necessity. We have had a series of disastrous fires in recent times, affecting both the commercial and the heritage sectors; no society can afford these kinds of losses on such a consistent basis if it is to have any hope of development.
And then we have the cross which is GPL. Voltage fluctuations preceded the Sacred Heart fire, as they have some others. When is this problem of unstable voltage going to be addressed in a systematic way, because until it is, everyone's property is at risk - including state property. Has the Government given any consideration to what, potentially, voltage fluctuations are costing the economy in terms of damaged equipment and probable fires?
A church will no doubt be built on the site of the original, but it will not look like the Sacred Heart Church we all knew. The character of Main Street has now changed forever, and the capital and Guyana at large are the poorer for it.