Within a two-hour span on Saturday evening, the Burnaby Fire Department responded to three fires in different locations throughout the city.
"It was a busy night on Saturday night," Fire Chief Shaun Redmond said. "Basically, it started at 5:30 p.m. and I think we were finished around 10:30/ 10:45 p.m."
"Everybody was busy," he added. "Every truck in Burnaby was in action on Saturday night."
No one was hurt in relation to the three fires.
"There were no injuries in any of the incidents, which we're thankful for," Redmond said.
The first incident was an electrical fire at a highrise on Barker Avenue at 5:30 p.m.
"We got it under control fairly quickly," Redmond said. "They were there for a while though, for a couple of hours, because they were just making sure they had all the hotspots and everything out."
For that call, there were 19 personnel there, according to Redmond, and Burnaby RCMP was also on scene.
The next was a cooking fire at a residence in the 3700-block of Manor Street at about 7:15 p.m., he said.
"I guess some residents left their suite or their room and went out and forgot they left something on the stove. That happens quite often, actually," he said. "In this particular case, our crew had good contact with the people that were there and the occupants said they were on their way back, so we didn't have to gain forceful entry. We were able to wait for them to get there."
Though the situation was managed quickly, it took as much personnel as a normal building fire response, he added, and overlapped with another call.
"The calls came in about two minutes apart," Redmond said. "We were stretched pretty thin at that point, we had every truck pretty well occupied, but not for a significant amount of time."
The last was a car fire in the underground parkade of a highrise at 9210 Salish Court, he said.
Two hundred residents were evacuated while the fire department located the fire and ventilated the area once it was put out, he added.
"Obviously we needed quite a bit more resources because it involved an evacuation," Redmond said, adding the evacuation was a precautionary measure because of the amount of smoke.
"They just wanted to make sure that no one would be exposed to that," he said.
Car fires in underground lots can be particularly challenging, Redmond added.
"Generally when we get a fire in an underground, its very difficult to locate where the actual fire is because the parking area completely fills with smoke and it's quite dense, and it takes us a long time to actually find the source," he said. "In most cases we can knock that down pretty quick, but then we're left dealing with the excessive smoke so it takes a long time to clear that out."
The fire on Barker Avenue is being investigated and the department will do follow-ups on the other two fires, he said.
