Senior rescued from burning house in Campbellford
Taken to Peterborough Regional Health Centre following $300K fire
CAMPBELLFORD — Firefighters rescued an elderly man they found lying on the floor after a house fire Sunday at the corner of Cockburn and Second streets in Campbellford.
The fire was reported just before noon Sunday and firefighters were at the scene less than four minutes after. “It was going pretty good when we got here,” Trent Hills fire department Chief Tim Blake said. Flames and smoke were “pretty heavy,” which made for “adverse conditions” when firefighters entered the single-storey house.
A neighbour spotted smoke in the porch and alerted a firefighter, Joe Robertson, who put the call out that a structure fire was in progress and that a person was possibly trapped inside, Blake said.
“The search team went in, found an elderly man on the (living room) floor (and) brought him out,” Blake said.
He had been “overcome by the smoke.”
Paramedics took him to
Campbellford Memorial Hospital where he was “treated and stabilized” before being transferred to Peterborough Regional Health Centre.
The man’s female partner “was asleep in the back bedroom at the time,” Blake said.
Robertson woke her up with his knocking on the locked front door and she came out on her own.
She was taken to hospital but returned home later the same day.
There are smoke alarms in the house, but they are “remote from where the fire was, so that’s why they didn’t go off,” Blake said.
The porch is being looked at as “area of origin” and is being investigated by the Ontario Fire Marshal’s Office.
“We have no reason to believe right now that it was anything suspicious,” Christopher Partridge, one of the investigators, said Monday morning.
A “lot of the rooms (were left) untouched” because their doors were shut, so “the fire was unable to spread,” he said.
Blake estimated damage at around $300,000, with the fire having gone into the attic.