Mr Darren Toh was a picture of dejection as he looked at the remains of his five-month-old $23,000 motorcycle.
'All I have is the exhaust,' said Mr Toh, 31, a storeman.
His was one of 11 motorcycles and three cars that were gutted in a late-night blaze at a multi-storey carpark at Woodlands Drive 70 on Sunday.
Firefighters were alerted at 11.30pm, and they managed to bring the fire at Block 709A under control within 20 minutes.
Anxious residents were then allowed into the affected third storey of the carpark to see if their vehicles were damaged.
Mr Toh, who bought his high-end green Kawasaki Z1000 in February, was seen poking the remains of the bike with his red umbrella in disbelief.
His girlfriend, Ms Shelyn Sim, 20, an accounts assistant, said that they were asleep when they were awakened by loud popping noises.
She said: 'My boyfriend looked outside the window and saw the carpark on fire, and immediately rushed down.
'The fire was very big and we heard four or five explosions. I think it was the fuel tanks.'
Another resident, undergraduate Serene Quek, 20, said the heat from the fire was so strong that she could feel it from the 10th-storey staircase outside her flat.
There was also a lot of smoke and a strong burning smell.
It took firemen 20 minutes to put out the blaze on the third storey of the carpark.
She said at one point the fire looked as though it would spread to other levels of the carpark.
She said: 'We were worried about my dad's car. He parked it on the other side (of the carpark, away from the blaze), but the fire was spreading and we couldn't see the damage inside.'
To the family's relief, their car was not one of those damaged.
But Mr Nor Ismail, 24, a sales coordinator, was not so lucky.
His nine-year-old Honda XR 400 motorcycle was completely destroyed. So was his 19-year-old brother's four-month-old Honda SP125.
He said that the bikes, which together cost about $8,000, had been parked side by side.
Mr Nor said he had parked his motorbike around 11.15pm ? just before the blaze started.
He did not notice anything suspicious as he left the carpark.
He said that when he was woken up by the commotion.
He heard shouts of 'carpark fire' and saw the huge blaze exactly where he had parked his vehicle.
He said: 'I knew my bike was gone already'.
SPATE OF CRIMES
Resident Pearlyn Soh, 37, who called The New Paper hotline about the fire and snapped pictures of it, said there have been a spate of crimes in the neighbourhood recently.
She said that a few months ago, the police put up an appeal for witnesses to motorbike parts thefts at the same carpark to come forward.
In March, a fire damaged four cars at an open-air carpark next to Eunos MRT station.
Three months earlier, a car had caught fire, again in a Eunos carpark.
Last August, 24 motorcycles in three carparks around Woodlands were reportedly torched in a single night.
Both the police and the Singapore Civil Defence Force are investigating Sunday's fire.
Map depicting the exact location of the Multi-Storey carpark
