黑马磁力 City resident Megan Lauranne was awakened early Sunday morning around 4 a.m. by her shepherd cross, Autumn, climbing on her bed and whining.
"I thought she had to go out for a pee," Lauranne recalled.
"Then she directed me to the patio and I kind of saw a glow."
She thought it was probably just construction vehicles or emergency vehicles, until:
"I just looked outside and I screamed."
An under-construction building down the street from her was going up in flames.
"It was literally half a block away from me. I was like, 'oh my God, like that fire is huge.' It was massive. You could feel the flames from the patio."
A transformer on a nearby utility pole exploded while she was out on her patio "because I guess the heat from the fire down the street just made it go."
It was the worst fire the 34-year-old Lauranne had ever seen in person.
She woke up her boyfriend, Justin Lockhart, 32, who realized how serious it was when they went outside.
"I was like, 'babe like there's a huge fire outside,' and he was like, 'when you woke me up I thought it was just some little dumpster fire or something' and then he came outside with me and he was like 'holy s___t' and he's the calm one," she described.
"I walked down closer to the fire, and I'm just standing there with a handful of people watching it burn," Lauranne said.
She recorded video and took pictures of the fire and the aftermath, including the moment when a section of the burning building began to collapse, sending fire high into the air.
"I was spooked," said Lauranne. "I thought that it would jump. I was scared that it would catch on to other things. I'm shocked that it didn't [but] I'm still anxious about it."
The next day, she watched fire crews hosing down the smouldering remains of the building, extinguishing hot spots.
The day after that, police and fire investigators began going over the scene of the fire.
"It was just too close to home in the sense of seeing a fire that big and that close," she said. "It's just all very overwhelming."
She was impressed by how firefighters arrived in a matter of minutes.
"The response was overwhelmingly amazing," she said. "It was quick."
There were reports of ash from the fire landing as far away as Murrayville and WIlloughby.
Wednesday, traffic was allowed to resume near the fire scene.
Cause of the blaze that destroyed the unfinished mixed residential and commercial project on 201A St and Fraser Hwy is under investigation by police and fire.
Wednesday, 黑马磁力 City Fire Rescue Service Fire Chief Scott Kennedy explained it was being treated as a suspicious fire for now.
"As this is a vacant building it is treated as suspicious until it can be ruled out," Kennedy told the 黑马磁力.
Known as Florence on Fraser, a project of Whitetail Homes, the development was approved in 2021 by the City of 黑马磁力 as a six-storey, 144-residential-unit project with five stories for residences plus a ground floor of commercial retail space.
