Michael Ertzinger says a “loud whoosh” alerted him to a fire in the basement of his Edinburgh Street house in North Burnaby on the morning of March 1, according to a first-person account of the ordeal posted online.
He says he yelled at his family to get out and managed to momentarily subdue the blaze in the lower level of the split-level home with a fire extinguisher – but the fire reignited.
After his mother and brother escaped, he says he went back inside the burning building with a neighbour’s garden hose in a bid to slow the flames.
“I kept low to the floor, holding the hose above me in order to douse the surrounding walls with water,” Ertzinger says. “I managed to keep the fire out of the garage and managed to slow its spread up the hallway.”
At that point, firefighters arrived and led him out of the building, he says.
Assistant fire Chief Greg Young confirmed firefighters were called to a house fire in the 4100 block of Edinburgh at 7:21 a.m. on March 1.
On arrival, he said they found smoke billowing out of all four sides of the building and one resident inside the front door with a garden hose trying to “extinguish the flames.”
“The guy is involved in music, so he had a room that was full of instruments,” Young said. “He had guitars and trumpets and pianos and all kinds of musical instruments. I guess he had a studio in the house.”
Ertzinger, who escaped the fire with no shoes and just the clothes on his back, says he still owes $70,000 for some of that equipment, and it would take $250,000 to replace the studio – which he says he’s spent the last seven years building up.
He says the studio “became uninsured” with the COVID-19 lockdown and the accompanying loss of work in the music industry.
“My purpose, dreams, sense of meaning in the world, livelihood and future career feel like they have been wiped away,” he says.
To help Ertzinger recover, a fellow Metro Vancouver musician has launched a GoFundMe campaign.
David Brown, a board member and past president of the Vancouver Musicians’ Association, describes Ertzinger a talented pianist and trumpet player who had been working long hours to become a multi-instrumentalist, composer and producer.
“Losing all of his expensive musical instruments and recording equipment in this terrible accident is a tremendous setback to him,” Brown says in the introduction to his GoFundMe campaign. “Our hope is that you will be inspired by Michael's dedication to his vision and life's calling and that you will want to help support him in getting back on his feet again.”
Another GoFundMe campaign has been set up by a neighbour to help Ertzinger’s family rebuild after losing their home.
Burnaby Fire Department chief fire prevention officer George Assaf said investigators have determined that the non-suspicious fire started in Ertzinger’s studio and is being investigated, but the exact cause might never be known.
“That’s pretty much the case with many fires,” Assaf said. “We know where it started and the kinds of things that were there, but we can’t determine exactly whether it was this particular plug or that particular wire or if there was some other cause.”
Assaf said the incident is a costly painful reminder of the importance of installing smoke detectors on every level of a home.
“Apparently they only had a smoke detector on the main floor in the kitchen, and that didn’t go off because the smoke was going up the stairwell, up to the bedroom area first.”
Follow Cornelia Naylor on Twitter @CorNaylor
Email [email protected]
