Building badly burned
Wolfville’s Danji Restaurant destroyed during late night fire
Wolfville resident escapes through window as apartment complex catches fire
A woman trapped by a raging fire in Wolfville June 12 kicked out a screen in her second-storey window and dangled from the ledge before jumping to safety with the help of a passerby.
The woman, who didn’t want to be identified, sat quietly on a park bench next to her former home on Elm Street early Wednesday morning, describing the terrifying moments after she first became aware the building was on fire.
She said she was alone in the living room of her apartment above the Danji Restaurant when she saw smoke coming from her door to the outside.
She said she opened the door, which was at the back of the building, saw the deck was on fire, and closed the door again.
When people outside asked if she was sure she couldn’t get out that way, “I opened it again and the wind brought (the fire) in the house,” she said.
She closed the door again and headed for the front of the house.
She kicked out the screen in the window and climbed out. Luckily, the window was over the restaurant’s outside menu, which was enclosed in a small box.
“The menu is perfectly placed, that when I slid out of the window I just put my feet on the menu and my head was (almost) to the top of the window. From there I was still six feet up, and that’s where he helped me down.”
She only suffered a bruise on her arm in the ordeal, but four animals in the apartment were lost.
Justin Swinamer and his father were on their way back home to Windsor when they stopped in Wolfville for a bite to eat at the Subway restaurant, which is across Main Street from Elm Street.
He said they didn’t notice anything when they went inside, but when they came out about 15 minutes later the back of the Danji building was on fire.
“Honestly, I thought it was a bonfire at first, until I realized where we were,” he said.
“I ran down the street and saw her climbing out the window, so I handed my phone off to Dad to talk to 911, and helped her out the window.”
He said the woman stood on his shoulders and he had hoped to get her to slide down onto them, but she fell backwards. Another person who was behind him caught the woman while he grabbed her legs.
“All I was thinking about was get- ting her down,” he said.
He said the woman’s car was parked next to the building, “but luckily it was a standard and we were able to put it in neutral and push it across the road.”
He said there was no smoke coming out of the front window at that point.
“When we were first there it was just the back deck on fire,” he said. Within a couple of minutes smoke was pouring out of the window, and in roughly 10 minutes, “the whole house was ablaze,” he said.
He said he could hear what sounded like paint cans or something exploding in back of the building.
The first firefighter arriving on scene reported significant fire at the back of the building, Wolfville Fire Chief Todd Crowell said.
The first crews on scene attacked the fire from an aerial truck and used large hoselines to try to knock the fire down enough that they could go inside.
Crowell said the fire appeared to start at the back of the building on the outside, and then spread up to the deck and ran through the second floor. He said high winds from the west pushed the fire through faster, but he said if those winds had been from the south or east the fire would have had a higher chance of spreading to the nearby Troy restaurant, about 4.5 metres away
That building did suffer significant heat damage, he said, and a small shed between the two was significantly damaged.
A representative from the Office of the Fire Marshal was called to the scene to help investigate the cause.
Firefighters from Hantsport, Greenwich and New Minas were also called to the scene.