No second chances for Magog House
Historic Sherbrooke building goes up in smoke
One bystander called it “the end of an era,” as he watched the building burn on Wednesday morning. Magog House, the home of the former Magog hotel and one of Sherbrooke’s oldest buildings, is no more. A fire that broke out for as-yet unknown reasons on Wednesday morning was the building’s second of 2017 and was the nail in the coffin of a structure that has been a part of Sherbrooke’s downtown core since 1836.
“I cannot put the lives of my firefighters in danger,” said Sherbrooke Fire Chief Stéphane Simoneau just prior to the start of the demolition on Wedensday afternoon. “Despite the fact that this is a heritage building, we made the decision to demolish it for the safety of the public.”
Simoneau explained that because of the structure of the heritage building, the day long fire and water damage made it increasingly likely that the building would collapse in the coming
days. Support walls on the second and third floors had collapsed, increasing the pressure of the outside walls on the floors inside.
“We had a lot of difficulty fighting this fire because it was a building that was on the one hand being renovated and on the other, largely abandoned,” Simoneau said. “As soon as we understood that there was no one to evacuate we adopted a defensive strategy to avoid the fire spreading rather than trying to save the building.”
That strategy, he said, involved largely spraying down the outside of the building, meaning that very little of the water was making its way into the heart of the structure. As a result, a fire that was first reported just after 5 a.m. was still going strong at 3:30 in the afternoon.
With the fire still burning and the focus shifted to demolition, the Fire Chief said that it was far too early to be able to say what started this fire although he was able to say that the initial blaze seems to have been on the abandoned second floor. Asked if the demolition would hinder the investigation, Simoneau said that many pieces of information were recorded over the course of the day and that the Police will be involved in the investigation as it moves forward.
“This does not mean that we are saying it was a criminal act,” the fire chief stated, “but it will allow us to cover every possibility.”
The building’s internal sprinkler system limited damage from an electrical fire last April, but the building was still mostly empty and in recovery mode.
“An empty building always prompts questions,” the Simoneau said “People can interpret it how they will, but anything is possible.”
The building was most recently home to several businesses including the Le Magog, Duplessis and L’otre Zone Bars but had in the past been the location of the Magog Hotel. The Duplessis closed its doors for good after the fire in April and the L’otre Zone had been on the verge of reopening. Le Magog, which suffered only minimal damage in the spring, was little more than smoking ruins by 9 a.m.