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Posted Nov 17, 2009, 2:28 PM
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Mooderator
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Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: Aylmer, Québec
Posts: 21,420
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Did anyone hear about the suspicious fire at that house next door?
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Suspic...n+women+only+building/2225799/story.html
Quote:
Suspicious fire forces evacuation of women-only building
Molotov cocktail suspected after fire spreads quickly at Centretown building
OTTAWA — Rose Petitfour was in bed in her second-floor room shortly before midnight on Saturday when she heard a pair of male voices shout.
“They said ‘Hey, please. Please, lady. Move! Move! Move!’” she recalled Sunday.
Petitfour, 28, can’t be sure if the voices she heard preceded the suspicious fire that gutted the downtown rooming house where she lived, or if they were said in reaction to it. By the time she got up and out, the house was ablaze.
“I just ran,” she said.
Andrea Payer, a neighbour whose Lisgar Avenue apartment building backs on to the rooming house at 230 Nepean St. also heard the voices. “It sounded like a fight or panic,” she says. “I dismissed it as people coming out of the building, but then I found out it was only women living there.”
By the time Payer grabbed her camera and made her way around the block, the first of the eight fire trucks and 32 firefighters used to bring the blaze under control were already on the scene.
Slightly more than 20 women were evacuated from the building where, according to owner Bruce Mitchell, 17 tenants — many international students at University of Ottawa and Carleton University — lived. There were no deaths or injuries.
“I’m certainly relieved that there was no loss of life, that’s for sure,” he said.
According to police, the presence of accelerants was detected by an arson dog Sunday. Det. Perry Biddiscombe cautioned, however, that he couldn’t yet confirm whether arson was the cause.
“It’s still under investigation,” he said. “We still have to talk to the firefighters and tenants.”
Biddiscombe credited the absence of injuries to the house’s smoke alarms and fire pull-stations. “I think the owner took a lot of care in retrofitting the building,” he said.
District Fire Chief Michael MacCormac, meanwhile, said firefighters on the scene Saturday night noted that the fire reacted as though an accelerant was used.
“Dealing with accelerants,” he said, “you’re looking at a whole different ballgame with how a fire will travel and how it will react.
“With the firefighters going in, they have to attack that differently, and they knew that right off the bat. It was not reacting the same way as it normally would at other fires — you put the water on it and it doesn’t go out. It just keeps flaring up.
“That’s indicative of something that’s not a Class-A combustible material, like a couch or wood,” he added. “It could be gas or kerosene or an accelerant like that.”
Ottawa Fire Service Captain Sheldon Ridgeway confirmed Saturday night that the fire department had received calls that a molotov cocktail had been thrown into the building.
According to neighbour Marie-Laure Wagner, two waiters from the nearby Aroma Meze Restaurant ran into the burning building to get residents out, some of whom were reluctant to leave.
“(One) told me he saw the fire and the flames and rushed into the building and went upstairs, looked at a woman and said ‘come on, get out, get out’,” said Wagner.
“The woman wouldn’t get out. She said ‘wait, wait, wait, who are you?’
“Finally the waiter yelled at the woman ‘Come on, get out,’ and he got her out,” said Wagner.
Meanwhile, as firefighters fought the blaze, a number of Ottawa Senators, including captain Daniel Alfredsson, were at a private party next door at Beckta Dining & Wine, one of the city’s most exclusive restaurants.
A woman who declined to be identified, but said she was at the same party with the Senators’ players, told the Citizen that a resident of the rooming house ran into the restaurant screaming that there was a fire and that everyone had to get out of the restaurant.
“She was hysterical, barefoot, in a bathrobe, yelling and screaming, we really didn’t believe. We ignored her,” said the woman. “We thought it was a street person imagining a fire,” she said.
However, Alfredsson said in a statement released by the team Sunday that “our group was in a separate area upstairs at Beckta, so we didn’t see the woman come in.
“The restaurant staff kept everyone informed. Initially they told us all was fine, but shortly afterwards they told us we should leave the restaurant for precaution.
“We were done anyhow at that time and getting ready to leave. There were already fire trucks there when we stepped outside and more were coming. At that point all I saw was just smoke,” Alfredsson said in the statement.
Saturday’s Nepean Street fire is the latest in a recent spate in Ottawa.
Last Sunday, a fire at the Cornerstone women’s shelter on MacLaren Street claimed the life of a 61-year-old woman, while two days before that, a 45-year-old man died in a fire on Penny Drive in the Bayshore area, while another, 55, was critically injured in a Bronson Avenue blaze. Additionally, a fire last Wednesday at a Florence street rooming house caused more than $200,000 in damage to the building.
With files from David Gonczol
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
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edit - here's a pic I took of the house a while ago (Beckta is on the left)
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And I also like your new camera 
Pdi
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