Screenshot from a video showing smoke emanating from the fire at Constant Spring Tax Office on Monday
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Emeleo Ebanks, Public Relations Officer at the Fire Brigade and Meris Haughton, Chief Corporate Communications Officer at TAJ
A probe has been launched to determine the cause of Monday morning's fire at Constant Spring Tax Office in St. Andrew.
It's reported that the fire broke out in the registry.
No one was injured.
Teams from the Half-Way-Tree and York Park Fire Stations responded about 8:30 and the blaze was later brought under control.
"When we arrived on the location, the fire was confined to a refrigerator in an office section. So we have the investigators making that that is indeed what started the fire and not something secondary to the refrigerator," Emeleo Ebanks, Public Relations Officer for the Jamaica Fire Brigade, told Radio Jamaica News.
Tax Administration Jamaica (TAJ) has said the extent of the damage caused by the fire has not yet been ascertained.
Meris Haughton, Chief Corporate Communications Officer at TAJ, said most of the damage is on the building's basement floor, where services related to drivers' licences are processed.
"The assessment continues, so we have a team of persons there now doing that assessment. We have since restored power to the banking hall and the upper floor. However, we're still gonna have to do some clean up of the area because smoke would have been in the building," she said.
Miss Haughton told Radio Jamaica News it should be known by Tuesday if documents were destroyed in the fire.
However, she noted that "a lot our things are electronically stored, so we should be able to recover backup of a lot of those information."
The collectorate was closed on Monday following the fire and will remain closed on Tuesday.
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