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When Fire Meets the Limits of Water: What Hagley Park Road Is Teaching Us About Resilience
Keith Trowers built his auto parts business over 30 years. Last Thursday, he watched it burn.
Standing in front of Ketro Trading Company on Hagley Park Road, having managed to pull a few items from the building before the fire reached it, the managing director spoke with the kind of quiet devastation that follows a loss that outpaces language. Millions gone. Seven employees out of work. "It's a new beginning," he said — though clearly, the old one didn't need to end.
The fire reportedly started just after 11 AM in the repair section of neighbouring Superior Honda Parts Limited, then spread. By afternoon, 15 fire trucks were on scene. Firefighters battled late into the evening. Two required medical attention. The smoke was visible for miles.
These are the kinds of fires that reshape what people believe about risk. Not because disasters like this are unexpected, but because each one quietly reinforces a question the business community hasn't fully answered yet: what does genuine fire resilience actually look like, and who is responsible for building it?
The Water Problem Is Real — and Bigger Than Any One Incident
One detail from the Hagley Park Road fire deserves more attention than it received. At a critical point, firefighters encountered challenges accessing water from a nearby hydrant that appeared to have been vandalised. Jamaica is also currently under severe drought conditions. A prohibition order against water wasting has been in place across six parishes since August 17.
This intersection — an active commercial fire, a compromised hydrant, and an island-wide water shortage — is exactly the kind of scenario that pushes firefighting to its limits. And it surfaces something that fire safety professionals understand well: water, for all its availability and effectiveness on Class A fires involving wood, cloth, and ordinary combustibles, is not the only tool in the arsenal.
When asked by The Gleaner about the water access challenges, our Chief Technical Officer - Wayne Farquharson was direct. "You have dry chemical fire protection, you have CO2, you have FM-200, you have foam, you have other mediums," he noted, adding that the use and occupancy of a building may sometimes require specific suppression methods and prevention strategies.
That observation points to something structural rather than situational. Different buildings, different contents, different fire risks — and the appropriate suppression strategy for a commercial auto parts operation with flammable fluids, solvents, and hydrocarbons on site is genuinely different from what works in an office or a warehouse full of dry goods. Professional fire safety protocol recognises this explicitly: sometimes, the right response requires changing the extinguishing medium based on the specific use and occupancy of the building.
Building-Specific Risk Is the Gap Few Talk About
Most discussions about fire in Jamaica focus on response — how quickly the brigade arrived, how many trucks were deployed, how the blaze was brought under control. All of that matters, and the courage and determination of the firefighters who battled for hours at Hagley Park Road is not in question.
What gets far less attention is the period before a fire starts. Specifically, whether buildings are designed, audited, and equipped in ways that account for what they actually contain and how they actually behave in a fire.
Suppression systems, detection strategies, and fire protection specifications are not generic. They are derived from the construction materials, compartmentation, height, area, and fire-break relationships of each specific building. A mechanic's workshop with petroleum products and solvents requires a different fire risk profile than the retail showroom next door — even if they share a wall. No two buildings are alike in this regard, even when they look similar from the outside.
This is where the conversation about resilience has to start: not at the moment of ignition, but at the point when a building is designed, approved, and opened for business. And it is precisely here that private sector technical expertise has a meaningful contribution to make.
The Case for Collaboration — Not Correction
Jamaica's construction sector is growing. The Municipal Corporations have processed nearly J$2 trillion in building approvals in recent years. J$446.8 billion in property is currently exposed to fire risk nationally. What those numbers describe is not a failure of any one institution — it is an indication of how much is at stake, and how specialised the work of protecting it has to be.
The Jamaica Fire Brigade does extraordinary work under significant pressure. But modern fire safety is a multi-disciplinary challenge, and no public institution anywhere in the world is expected to carry the full weight of it alone. The most resilient fire safety systems in comparable jurisdictions are built on a combination of public enforcement, private sector technical input, and ongoing collaboration between the two.
That collaboration takes many forms. Pre-construction fire safety concept design. Independent audits of existing commercial properties. Building-specific risk assessments that account for occupancy type, stored materials, and structural characteristics. Emergency planning and staff training tailored to the people who actually work inside each building.
None of this is about replacing what already exists. It is about adding the kind of specialised, building-specific technical depth that strengthens outcomes — for property owners, for insurers, for the firefighters who may one day respond, and for the employees and customers inside.
The Conversation Worth Having
Hagley Park Road will not be Jamaica's last major commercial fire. The question worth sitting with — as a business owner, a developer, an insurer, or a property manager — is whether the buildings in your care have been genuinely evaluated for the specific risks they carry.
Not whether they have a fire certificate. Whether they are actually fire safe.
That distinction is where the work happens. And if you are ready to have that conversation, it is one we welcome.
Wayne Farquharson is the Chief Technical Officer and Managing Director of Farbo Fire Safety Consultants Limited. He is a former Senior Deputy Superintendent of the Jamaica Fire Brigade, a Technical Committee Member at the Bureau of Standards Jamaica (Fire Aspect), and an Affiliate International Member of the Institution of Fire Engineers, with over 35 years in fire safety engineering and life safety design.
Sources: The Jamaica Gleaner, August 28, 2026; The Jamaica Observer, August 27, 2026.
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