Sunderland Citizens Advice office completely destroyed by blaze during last night's riot
Sunderland Citizens Advice chief officer, Denise Irving, is "completely devastated" after seeing the charity's office gutted by fire.
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00:00Q. Kim, obviously there have been lots of reports about the police station being set on fire, but obviously as we look here it looks like Citizens Advice Bureau has been badly damaged as well, yeah?
00:10Yeah, that unit of ours is completely burnt out now unfortunately. That's our money advice unit, where we offer advice on debt and other crisis situations on a daily basis.
00:23And really we just don't know where we're going to be on Monday, we don't know if we'll be able to operate.
00:28Q. How did you find out about it then?
00:30I got a text from one of the team to say that the windows had been put out and then a follow-up call to say actually they've set it on fire.
00:38I live in Durham so we couldn't get through and we rang the fire service and the police and we were told to stay put.
00:46And unfortunately we could just watch it as everybody else did on Facebook.
00:51Q. I know the answer's pretty obvious, but how do you feel about what the people have done here?
00:54We're absolutely devastated and gutted. Honestly it's thrown us so far back, we just don't know what we're doing.
01:02We're going to have to take some time to reset and obviously we have people coming to us every day in serious crisis,
01:08looking for food parcels and fuel vouchers and crisis support.
01:12And on Monday I'm going to be stood on the pavement trying to manage the floor and try and manage some clean-up because we just don't know what we're doing at the moment.
01:23Q. What do you make of the disorder which broke out in general last night?
01:26Again, I don't know what the motivation was in terms of targeting our unit.
01:31We believe the thinker that it was the police station, but for us all we're concerned about is how do we manage to meet the needs of the community going forward
01:39and how are we going to sort this mess out because we are a very small charity with very little in terms of team numbers.
01:49So we're going to have our hands full trying to get it cleaned up and find some way to sit.