WESTLOCK – Town of Weslock firefighters determined the long weekend fire that shut down three Main Street businesses was accidental and caused by electrical equipment failure.
An investigation into the blaze was held May 26 — all parking spaces in front of the site were closed to the public until the end of that day. The final result, which the town shared on its Facebook page earlier today, confirmed the early report that the fire was not suspicious.
“There are four parties involved: the Town of Westlock, the building insurer, The Flower Shoppe insurer and Fringes insurer and each of them need to have equal access to the scene as we’re all trying to determine cause,” said town fire chief Stuart Koflick on the day of the investigation.
“From there they provide a report and then the insurance companies sort it out.”
Town, Westlock County and even Barrhead fire crews, as well as the RCMP, responded to the alarm call just after 5 p.m. May 23 and arrived to find smoke billowing out of The Flower Shoppe at 10623 100th Avenue. Firefighters were quickly able to suppress the fire, while Main Street, between 106th and 107th Streets, was closed to traffic as crews remained at the site past 10 p.m. — Koflick said he returned to the scene around 1 a.m. to ensure the blaze was completely out.
“We responded with Tower 1 and based on our assessment of the situation we requested mutual aid from Westlock County, which included Pickardville and Clyde and due to the potential for escalation we had Tower 6 respond from Barrhead as well,” said Koflick May 24, noting there were no injuries.
“We made an initial interior attack and suppressed the fire in The Flower Shoppe within 30 to 45 minutes and declared it under control. At that time it was just a matter of ensuring that any extension into Fringes Hair (which shares a wall with the Flower Shoppe), and all hot spots were doused.”
In Facebook posts The Flower Shoppe, Essential Massage (which shares the space with The Flower Shoppe) and Fringes Hair noted they’ll all be closed for the foreseeable future and thanked firefighters for their quick action. Building owner David Truckey, who’s also a town councillor, publicly thanked the department at council’s May 25 meeting.
“It’s very amazing and humbling to watch a group of people jump up from the supper table and the hockey game and their families and throw on their gear and run into a burning building not knowing exactly what’s in front of them,” said Truckey. “Hat’s off to everybody I really appreciate not only what you did for me on the weekend, but what you do for everybody every day of the week.”
There’s a fair amount of smoke and water damage inside the building and although Koflick isn’t a structural engineer or an insurance adjuster, he thinks it can be saved. Of note, this is the second fire in downtown this year following the Jan. 31 blaze that consumed the Commerce Building.
“One of the things that was an advantage for us is that The Flower Shoppe does not have a high fire load — there’s not a lot of stuff in there like say a furniture store. So, the fire didn’t have an opportunity to gain momentum and cause a lot of damage,” Koflick explained.
“The other piece is that we call this a compartment fire, so within the building it’s kind of contained. Our initial attack included maintaining the integrity of that compartment so what we did is we opened the door and to buy us some time, we sprayed the roof with a straight stream and then closed the door and that allowed the steam to do the work — water turns to steam and it expands about 1,700 times. The really helped in the initial stages.
“Firefighting has changed from just putting the wet stuff on the hot stuff. Now it’s about fire science and fire behaviour. It’s interesting because we did a training session on fire behaviour and flow path on Thursday via Zoom and a couple of the comments from the crews on scene were that they remembered that from the training just the other night.”
