Man screamed for help for his trapped wife as home devoured by flames
Credit to Author: Susan Lazaruk| Date: Wed, 18 Dec 2019 00:56:27 +0000
A neighbour tried to enter a burning house in Burnaby early on Tuesday morning after one of the residents wearing pyjamas cried out for help for his wife from the second-floor balcony. But the flames were already too intense.
Firefighters later rescued a woman from the house, a so-called Vancouver special, on Capitol Hill in Burnaby but paramedics’ attempts to revive her failed. The man was rescued and survived but his condition wasn’t known.
“He was yelling, My wife is in the home,” said Maria Seed, who lives across the street on Ranelagh Avenue and was among the first of the neighbours on the scene when the fire started around 1 a.m.
“My son and my husband ran over when they saw the flames” and she followed them, she said.
Seed said her son went to the door to see if he could help but the flames were raging inside the house and they prevented him from entering.
“My son tried to go in, but he couldn’t” she said. “It was so sad.”
“They (her husband and son) saw the fire truck coming and they ran to tell them, I think there is a lady in the house,” she said. “They laid her on the lawn. All the firemen were trying to save her.”
She was astonished at how quickly the flames engulfed the house.
“By the time we got to the corner, it was burning so fast,” she said.
A Burnaby Fire investigator examines the bottom floor a house on the corner of Dundas and Ranelagh Avenue in Burnaby, B.C., where a person died what officials described as a fast moving fire, December, 17, 2019.
On Tuesday morning, the house was standing but the windows were blown out on the front and side of the house and the interior looked charred and gutted by fire.
An acrid smell of smoke hung in the air around the corner lot, at Dundas Street and Ranelagh Avenue. It was surrounded by yellow police tape and RCMP and fire officials remained at the scene around midday.
Seed, who has lived in the Capitol Hill neighbourhood for more than 30 years, said she didn’t know the couple, who lived there “probably longer.”
She said her son, who is in his 30s, knew their son, who is about the same age.
“(My son) called him and told him his parents’ house was burning,” she said. “He didn’t believe him, he (my son) said you’d better get down here right away.”
The homeowners’ son, and his “very pregnant” wife both came to the fire scene, said Seed.
“We feel very sorry for them,” she said.
A neighbour on the same side of the street, two doors down, said the couple who lived there kept to themselves.
“They were very quiet,” said P.K. Wong. “Very seldom would they talk to anybody. I would only see him take out his rubbish.”
Wong said he slept through the drama and didn’t find out about the fire until the morning.
Burnaby firefighters had been attending to a fire at a small building when calls came in around 1 a.m. Tuesday for an extensive fire at the two-storey home, with one person trapped inside, said Deputy Chief Chris Bowcock.
Firefighters faced heavy flames and smoke coming from the top floor of the home.
Crews launched rescue operations “under heavy heat, fire and smoke” and were able to pull one person from the fire, he said.
“You can imagine that requires a significant number of people and resources. So we went past extinguishment as a priority and focused on finding and locating the individuals in the building and then removing that individual,” said Bowcock.
Once they did that, that battled to knock the fire, he said.
He confirmed that one of the residents didn’t survive, despite attempts at revival.
The home suffered extensive damage. The cause of the fire is under investigation.
With file by Stephanie Ip
Burnaby Fire investigator looks inside a house on the corner of Dundas and Ranelagh Avenue in Burnaby, B.C., where a person died what officials described as a fast moving fire, December, 17, 2019.
A Burnaby Fire Investigator walks across the front of a house on the corner of Dundas and Ranelagh Avenue in Burnaby, B.C., where a person died what officials described as a fast moving fire, December, 17, 2019.
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