Woman dies in Burnaby fire after neighbours tried to help
A neighbour tried to enter a burning house in Burnaby early on Tuesday morning after one of the residents wearing pyjamas cried out for help for his wife from the second-floor balcony. But the flames already were too intense.
Firefighters later rescued a woman from the house, a so-called Vancouver special, on Capitol Hill in Burnaby, but paramedics’ attempts to revive her failed. The man was rescued and survived, but his condition wasn’t known.
“He was yelling, ‘My wife is in the home,’” said Maria Seed, who lives across the street on Ranelagh Avenue and was among the first of the neighbours on the scene when the fire started around 1 a.m. “My son and my husband ran over when they saw the flames” and she followed them.
Seed said her son went to the door to see if he could help, but the flames were raging inside the house and they prevented him from entering.
“My son tried to go in, but he couldn’t,” she said. “It was so sad.”
“They (her husband and son) saw the fire truck coming and they ran to tell them, I think there is a lady in the house,” Seed said. “They laid her on the lawn. All the firemen were trying to save her.”
She was astonished at how quickly the flames engulfed the house.
“By the time we got to the corner, it was burning so fast,” she said.
On Tuesday morning, the house was standing, but the windows were blown out on the front and side of the house and the interior looked charred and gutted by fire. An acrid smell of smoke hung in the air around the corner lot, at Dundas Street and Ranelagh Avenue. It was surrounded by yellow police tape and RCMP and fire officials remained at the scene around midday.
Seed said her son, who is in his 30s, knew their son, who is about the same age. “(My son) called him and told him his parents’ house was burning,” she said.
The homeowners’ son and his “very pregnant” wife both came to the fire scene, Seed said.
“We feel very sorry for them,” she said.
Burnaby firefighters had been attending to a fire at a small building when calls came in around 1 a.m. Tuesday for an extensive fire at the two-storey home, with one person trapped inside Deputy Chief Chris Bowcock, said.
Firefighters faced heavy flames and smoke coming from the top floor of the home.
Crews launched rescue operations “under heavy heat, fire and smoke” and were able to pull one person from the fire, he said. “You can imagine that requires a significant number of people and resources. So we went past extinguishment as a priority and focused on finding and locating the individuals in the building and then removing that individual,” Bowcock said.
Once they did that, they battled to knock down the fire, he said.