About 15 extra firefighters, two dispatchers and three engines were needed on the weekend to handle the hundreds of calls coming in after the majority of the city lost power.
Burnaby firefighters were still busy on Monday responding to calls related to the weekend storm.
Firefighters had been on high alert since noon on Saturday, responding to calls about downed trees, stuck elevators and other emergencies. At one point during the weekend, all seven fire halls lost power and were using backup generators, assistant fire chief Rick Weir told the NOW.
“Ever since the beginning of the storm, it’s just been nuts,” he said.
Luckily, the department only had one major incident during the storm, Weir said, and that was an apartment fire at 10th Avenue and McBride Boulevard on Sunday morning, along the New Westminster border.
“The call came in at 4:30 in the morning for a fire in a multi-family dwelling, which turned out to be a three-storey, wood-frame walk-up,” he said.
When firefighters arrived, flames were coming from one unit. The residents, a family of seven, had already escaped, so firefighters went to work knocking the blaze down.
“The drywall did its job; it prevented any extension into the floor above and/or the framing of the structure, so there’s no structural damage at all,” Weir said.
While there was no severe damage to the building, the family – a mother and father and five children – lost most of their possessions. They are now being taken care of by the city’s emergency social services, he added.
“They put them up in a hotel, so they’ve been taken care of in the interim,” Weir said.
The cause of the fire is still under investigation, but a preliminary sweep of the suite suggested a candle left unattended could have sparked the blaze. The apartment building had no power at the time, he said. (As a safety precaution, firefighters are reminding residents to use flashlights or lanterns, instead of candles, when the power is out.)
Weir estimated that since Saturday, the department had responded to more than 300 calls, but that’s a low estimate, he said.
The power outage caused the department’s computer system to crash, and firefighters were filing their reports manually, so only once the system is up and running and all the reports are inputted will the department have an accurate count of the number of calls on the weekend.
“They weren’t able to transfer any of the information on to the computers,” he said.
Most of the calls were for downed trees on power lines, or fallen power poles, according to Weir. Calls about downed trees on roads were the responsibility of city crews.
“We’re just more about life safety; making sure people aren’t going to get themselves in trouble with the power lines when they come down,” he said.
