‘Suspicious’ early morning fire destroys 4 Burnaby homes
Posted October 18, 2023 7:13 am.
Last Updated October 18, 2023 8:00 am.
A series of four homes in Burnaby have been badly damaged after an early morning fire tore through the structures Wednesday.
Burnaby Fire Department Assistant Fire Chief Gavin Summers tells CityNews that the four homes were slated for demolition and unoccupied.
“We got a call about 2:10 a.m., and crews arrived to fire four houses fully involved. … Our crews went into a defensive mode right away,” he explained.
Summers says the incident, at 18th Street and Griffiths Drive, was raised to a third alarm fire “because we needed the personnel to actually surround this area because it’s such a large area.”
The fire spread rapidly through the buildings, Summers explains, and needed 42 firefighters and 11 trucks to knock down the blaze.
One caller to CityNews says she could smell thick smoke from about half a kilometre away, “as it filled the entire nearby neighbourhood with smoke as thick as fog for some time.”
“[Another neighbour] smelled the fire all the way down from the Fraser foreshore area, which is several kilometres to the south, so the wind would have blown the smoke quite far,” Aimee Chung said.
The RCMP is securing the scene, Summers says, and fire investigators are also at the fire trying to determine the cause, but initial evidence suggests the fire is suspicious.
“Our crews are still on scene. It’s too dangerous for us to actually go and do a quick primer search because of the unstable parts of the buildings.
“We’re waiting for an excavator to come in and actually start taking the buildings down that way, and we’ll be on scene doing a search from our large apparatus or ladders and watching when they’re actually taking the building apart,” Summers said.
–With files from Sonia Aslam
