Heroes rush in
The building was razed, but no one was hurt thanks to quick action
A phone call from his mother asking him to come home late Sunday night was what put 18- year-old T.J. Fitzpatrick in the right place at the right time.
“Mom (had) called and told me to come home — first time ever,” he recalled. “I just so happened to listen to her.”
Fitzpatrick was driving along McGettigan Boulevard towards Canning Bridge when he noticed something out of the ordinary.
“I saw the peak of Ville Marie Hotel (was) on fire,” he said.
Just moments before, he had been hanging out in the parking lot of the Peninsula Mall with his buddies Justin Saunders and James Stapleton, both of whom
“I was two minutes away from my house when he called me and told me to turn around and come back,” said Saunders.
When Fitzpatrick arrived at the hotel, he expected to see emergency vehicles already on the scene.
“There was no one there. Not a soul,” he recalled.
Saunders and Stapleton arrived soon after.
The trio said when they approached the building, there was a man out front who had been awakened by the smell of smoke. When he went outside, the door to the building had locked behind him. They tried the main entrance, but it was also locked. Then they went to an entrance at the far end of the building towards St. Gabriel’s Hall, and, after a number of unsuccessful tries, were able to get in.
Once inside, they acted quickly to alert whoever was there of the fire.
“We kicked on the doors — woke them up and told them they had to leave,” Fitzpatrick said.
In a news release issued Monday, the RCMP said the three teenagers went through the building at their own peril and ensured everyone made it safely outside.
The young men say they just did what they felt was the right thing to do.
“We didn’t even think about our lives,” said Fitzpatrick.
“The first instinct was to go in,” added Saunders.
They said everything happened so fast there was no time to think. It wasn’t until afterwards that the realization of what they had done took hold.
“When I got out of it and I was stood up next to Justin, I was like, ‘Man, we were just in that,’” Fitzpatrick said.
They’ve been called heroes, but they brush it off as just being in the right place at the right time.
Five people had been in the building when the boys arrived, and there were no injuries. The hotel was destroyed.
“It is just lucky that it was not busier,” said owner Bern Farrell, noting that sometimes families in town for sporting events stay at the hotel.
Members of the Marystown Volunteer Fire Department got the call just after 1 a.m. Monday.
“It was the RCMP that called us, and they informed us that the roof at the Ville Marie Hotel was fully ablaze,” said fire chief Alex Coady.
He told The Southern Gazette that when firefighters arrived on the scene flames were coming from the roof.
The building has been used for a number of different purposes in the past — as portable classrooms for the Marystown school system and as office space for the Burin Peninsula School Board.
Coady said firefighters attempted to battle the fire from the inside, but extensive renovations over the years made it hard to gain access to the attic from below. Firefighters also went to the roof to try to get at the blaze, but the heat made the roof soft, said Coady.
“We took the firefighters off the roof (rather than) risk somebody going through the roof and getting trapped, probably in the attic space,” Coady said.
The department used a ladder truck to fight the fire from above.
At daylight, an excavator was called in to pull down the walls of the burning building.
Coady said they were concerned about a nearby building catching fire.
“We have St. Gabriel’s Hall, it is on the far end of the building. Where the two buildings are opposite each other is probably a 12- to 15-foot space.” St. Gabriel’s Hall was spared. Firefighters were on the scene Monday morning extinguishing hot spots.
The cause of the fire has not been determined, but it’s under investigation by the RCMP and the Fire Commissioner’s Office.