Burning wiring in Riga apartment block forces seven residents to evacuate

On Friday, 30 October, electrical wiring caught fire in the stairwell of a nine-storey residential building on Salnas Street in Riga. Seven people evacuated the building. The information was provided to the news agency LETA by the State Fire and Rescue Service (VUGD), the Latvian state body responsible for firefighting and rescue operations.

The call in Riga

The service received the call to Salnas Street at about 6 p.m. By the time firefighters arrived, the seven people had already left the building. Rescuers ventilated the premises, and work at the scene was completed within an hour. The source does not say whether anyone was injured, nor does it give a cause of the fire.

Fire in Madona municipality

At around 11 a.m., the service received a call to Kalsnava parish in Madona municipality. There, the attic floor of a single-storey residential house was burning over an area of 30 square metres. In this case too, residents left the building before rescuers arrived: two people evacuated.

Overview of the past 24 hours

In total, VUGD received 39 calls over the past day. Nine of them concerned extinguishing fires, 23 were for rescue work, and seven turned out to be false alarms, meaning no response was actually needed.

The service did not report other significant details about either incident, and the source offers no further information on what caused the fires.