{"id":77990,"date":"2025-10-13T15:52:06","date_gmt":"2025-10-13T15:52:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/77990\/"},"modified":"2025-10-13T15:52:06","modified_gmt":"2025-10-13T15:52:06","slug":"fire-forces-evacuation-at-douglas-village-shopping-centre-no-injuries-reported","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/77990\/","title":{"rendered":"Fire forces evacuation at Douglas Village Shopping Centre \u2014 no injuries reported"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There was relief all round on Monday after firefighters managed to avoid devastation following another car blaze at Douglas Village Shopping Centre.<\/p>\n<p>The public have been praising the quick thinking actions of shopping centre staff who immediately evacuated the location.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">It comes more than five years after a car park fire ravaged the centre on August 31, 2019, <a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.irishexaminer.com\/news\/munster\/arid-40080434.html\"> destroying 49 cars.<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">The building remained shut for 13 months after being deemed unsafe by engineers.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">A demolition of the car park and subsequent rebuilding followed. The centre eventually reopened for business in November, 2020. It was later sold in September 2022 to a local businessman for \u20ac21m.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">One shopper said her husband had been waiting for her to run an errand when the fire broke out on the first floor of the carpark at 2pm on Monday.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">\u201cMy husband was on the first floor and he saw fire and smoke in the distance before realising there was a car on fire. Meanwhile, inside the shopping centre everybody stayed calm and it all seemed very under control.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">&#8220;It was a strange sounding alarm and we immediately knew that something was really wrong.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">\n            It was hard to believe that something like this was happening again. They seem to be jinxed in that shopping centre.\u00a0\n        <\/p>\n<p class=\"\">&#8220;Luckily, this time it all ended well.\u201d She praised the response of shopping centre staff and firefighters.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">\u201cI heard a guy saying that they needed to get everyone out of the shopping centre. They reacted very quickly and calmly. I met my husband on the second floor. They weren\u2019t letting people use the escalators at that stage but I managed to make my way up there. At that point it looked like everything was under control.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">Investigations are underway to establish the cause of the fire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There was relief all round on Monday after firefighters managed to avoid devastation following another car blaze at&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":77991,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[72,79,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-77990","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-cork-news","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77990"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77990\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}