PETROLIA – One person had to be rescued from their unit after a fire broke out in a small apartment building here Sunday afternoon, but all tenants escaped to safety.
Brian Clark, deputy chief of the Petrolia and North Enniskillen fire department, said a woman living on the second floor of the Central Apartments, a Lambton County-run building on Greenfield Street near town hall and the Victoria Playhouse Petrolia, had to be helped outside during the evacuation.
“I got that female victim out,” he said.
She did not live in the unit that was affected by the fire. Crews were initially called mid-afternoon about smoke coming from apartment 203 on the other side of the building.
“Heavy smoke on the second floor,” Clark recalled when they initially arrived.
But he estimated they extinguished it within 10 minutes.
“The crews made a quick knockdown and put the fire out,” he said. “It wasn’t long.”
There was a lot of debris in the apartment, creating a significant fire load, he added. The person living there told officials he wasn’t home at the time.
The cause was still under investigation, Clark said.
In the meantime, crews were bringing in a temporary heated shelter for the displaced tenants. Clark was hopeful most of them could return at some point Sunday after they ensured the building was safe.
“We’ll just make sure everybody else is ventilated,” he said.
Firefighters from Plympton-Wyoming came in to help crews from Petrolia and North Enniskillen.
“The response was pretty quick,” Clark said.
Plympton-Wyoming firefighters left shortly before 3:30 pm Lambton provincial police and paramedics were also on site.