Lone resident escapes unhurt from $250K house fire in Sarnia

A lone tenant escaped unhurt after fire did $250,000 damage to a house overlooking the St. Clair River at St. Clair Parkway and LaSalle Line in Sarnia Friday morning.

Firefighters from Sarnia and neighboring St. Clair Township were at the scene and sections of both streets were closed to traffic in the morning.

Rajhe Kumar said he was sleeping at the time. “I smelled the smoke and then I woke up,” he said.

Kumar said he was able to get out uninjured. He had been renting the house for about one year.

He said the fire appeared to be in the roof.

Sarnia Fire Chief Bryan Van Gaver said the 911 call had an incorrect address, so firefighters from neighboring St. Clair Township were dispatched first.

As they were coming down the parkway, they didn’t see anything where they were expecting the call to be “and then they saw some smoke further down the road, which turned out to be Sarnia’s jurisdiction,” he said.

“They appropriately set up to fight the fire and also made notification to Sarnia dispatch that it was Sarnia’s area and we were dispatched,” Van Gaver said.

“We worked together and brought the fire under control and at that time St. Clair Township was released.”

The fire in the roof of the one-and-a-half storey home was “very problematic,” requiring fire crews to remove parts of the roof and access crawl spaces to get at it, Van Gaver said. “It was a struggle.”

St. Clair sent 20 firefighters from two stations and Sarnia added 15 firefighters from three stations, Van Gaver said.

Fire departments in Lambton County have mutual aid agreements to respond if another department needs help, typically when a fire service asks for help.

“This one didn’t work the way the system traditionally works,” Van Gaver said. “It was the wrong department dispatched out of the hop” due to incorrect information from the 911 call.

“We were notified late to the party it was actually our area,” he said. “The St. Clair crews acted appropriately discovering the fire and getting a quick charge on it.”

Sarnia did activate its mutual aid agreements while fighting a major fire at the Fairwinds Lodge retirement home earlier this year, Van Gaver said.

The fire was ignited by a bathroom fan and was concentrated to the north side of the attic which had been converted into bedrooms, the department said Friday afternoon in a news release.

Damage was estimated at about $250,000.

Neighbor Dan Smith said he saw fire and smoke coming from the house when he went outside about 6 am

“(Fire crews) hosed it down quite a bit and (the fire) kept popping back up,” Smith said. “There was a lot more smoke on the north side.”

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More pictures

Firefighters hose off their gear outside a fire-damaged home at St. Clair Parkway and LaSalle Line in Sarnia. (Paul Morden/The Observer)