1/2 The three burned-out cars have been towed away (photo: Tonnie Vossen)
Residents of an apartment block on Antoon Kerssemakersstraat in Nuenen were busy on Thursday night with buckets of water to extinguish the burning cars in their street. The fact that the fire was limited to the three cars is probably due to the alertness of some residents who already smelled a petrol smell earlier that night and decided to keep an eye on the case.
One of them is Liesbeth. “When I smelled a petrol smell around one o’clock, I saw a small fire outside. The grass between the tiles was on fire.” She managed to extinguish it with a bucket of water. “But I didn’t trust it, so I stayed awake and started posting from my bedroom.”
After an hour, she saw someone running up to the cars with a jerry can and dousing them with petrol. “I immediately banged on the window. The person was so shocked that he immediately ran away.”
“I’m very loud ‘fire! fire!’ start screaming.”
Once outside, Liesbeth saw the burning cars. “It was a big conflagration. I was then very hard ‘fire! fire!’ start screaming. The neighbor who was also awake started pressing all doorbells to warn residents.”
In the meantime, Liesbeth had called 112 and while waiting for the fire brigade, the entire block had already taken action with buckets of water. “Everyone was coming and going, neighbors from all floors came out with buckets of water.”
“We wanted to prevent fire from spreading to our homes.”
“We knew you couldn’t put out a car fire with that, but we wanted to prevent the fire from spreading to our homes,” says Liesbeth. “She calls it a miracle that her own car has escaped the dance. “The three cars next door are all burnt out.”
One of those cars belongs to Emiel, who also lives in the street. Little is left of his company car due to the fire. “The whole front is gone.” Emil is also shocked. “Nuenen is a very decent village, I don’t expect anything like this here.”
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