The Villamor family takes their meals inside their burnt home as other residents sift through the debris following an overnight fire that razed through a squatters' community of Baseco near a Manila port. – AP MANILA – Fire raced through a slum near the main port in Manila, killing a 5-year-old girl, gutting hundreds of shanties and leaving 4,000 people homeless, an official said Sunday. There were no other reports of deaths or major injuries in the Saturday night blaze at the Baseco Compound, a crowded slum along the rim of Manila Bay, Senior Fire Officer Emmanuel Gaspar said. An Associated Press photographer at the site saw people waiting to be treated for minor injuries, including wounds from glass shards. The cause of the fire, which raged for two hours, fanned by strong winds, is still under investigation, Gaspar said. Fires in Manila's overcrowded slums are common, with the tight living conditions allowing flames to quickly spread through houses made of light materials. Saturday's fire destroyed 500 shanties. Amid the ashes and a few wooden posts that were left of their home, Amorsolo Villamor's family ate their breakfast of rice gruel Sunday morning, unwilling to leave the tiny patch of land where their shanty used to stand. Villamor, his wife and three children shared the place with two other families. He said his family decided to return to their gutted home after running from the flames because they feared that other families may stake a claim to the land if they moved to a nearby village hall that was being turned into an evacuation center. Gwendolyn Pang, a National Red Cross official, said the victims were being housed in two evacuation centers within the compound.
