A young mother-to-be and another person were treated for smoke inhalation after a fire in a Highland home.
The woman was too upset to speak yesterday about the trauma of Thursday night’s blaze in Nairn, but she was not believed to have been physically injured.
However, a number of homes were evacuated as the flames took hold in the two-storey building.
The woman’s first-floor flat, in the town’s Watson’s Place, is understood to have been extensively damaged.
The resulting smoke damage could be seen yesterday on the exterior of the terraced building.
Part of the interior of an adjoining pet shop was also badly smoke-damaged.
The fire had penetrated the ceiling of its ground floor store-room below the flat.
Some of the shop’s stock was damaged.
According to a spokeswoman for the fire service, a pregnant woman and another adult were treated at the scene by an ambulance crew for the effects of smoke inhalation.
The brigade received an emergency call at 7.24pm on Thursday.
A Nairn crew used breathing apparatus while tackling the fire. It was joined by an incident support vehicle from Elgin.
To his horror, Colin MacKenzie who owns the adjoining Pampered Pets store but lives elsewhere, first learned of the blaze online.
“A message came up, saying ‘fire engulfing a top flat underneath Pampered Pets’. My son had, meanwhile, been here and handled the situation perfectly,” he said.
“It was contained by the time I got here but there was water all over the place. The firemen had to force the shop door to enter this part of the building.
“But we’re living, we’re all the right way up.”
Firefighters were stood down just before 9.30pm.
The cause of the blaze is being investigated.
In May, firefighters spent more than three hours fighting a house fire in Nairn.
The blaze destroyed about half of the semi-detached property in Grant Street and the whole house was smoke affected. No one was injured but an elderly woman was taken to hospital for a check-up on her breathing.
