A home near Delbrook Park in North Vancouver has been gutted following a blaze that took the District of North Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services over two hours to tackle.
The firefighters were called to a house fire on the corner of Delbrook Avenue and Windsor Road around 12:50 p.m. Saturday afternoon, said Assistant Fire Chief Dwayne Derban.
A single call from the homeowner quickly expanded to “multiple calls of a fairly substantial fire,” he said.
A crew of four trucks arrived to flames erupting outside of the home. The scale of the fire forced the team to shift to a defensive approach, fighting it from the outside, said Derban.
“Access was difficult. The yard was pretty heavily treed, so finding a way into the house was tricky, and the fire was fairly substantial inside the house,” he said.
“When the officer did a 360 of the building, part of the house actually collapsed near him. So it was fairly unstable at that point in time.”
Response teams worked for around two and a half hours tackling the blaze, accessing the fire from above.
“We had flames at all levels, all sides, so we ended up using our tower to put water on it through the burned roof.”
While there were no injuries, the house had been “pretty much completely destroyed,” said Derban.
The cause of the fire is still being determined.
With the North Vancouver District and City fire services working together to fight the blaze, the incident served as another example of how collaboration between the two municipalities makes an impact when carrying out rescues, said Derban.
“It was a District of North Vancouver address, but we had three City of North Vancouver trucks and a city chief there. It’s just nice to work with neighbours that treat your houses like their own.”
All crew members involved gave “great efforts” in working together well and staying “on the same page” throughout the event, he added.
“I was really proud of my officers on each of the trucks, everyone was fully focused and worked to put the fire out, and at the end of the day, everyone was safe,” he said. “And that was our main goal.”
Mina Kerr-Lazenby is the North Shore News’ Indigenous and civic affairs reporter. This reporting beat is made possible by the Local Journalism Initiative.
