Fire sparks calls for old hospital demolition
After responding to another small fire within the derelict hospital building on Queenston Street, St. Catharines deputy fire Chief Dave Upper shares the hopes of neighbouring residents that the massive building will be demolished as soon as possible.
“We’d love it to come down,” Upper said.
Firefighters arrived at the building late Sunday afternoon to extinguish a fire set within plastic laundry hampers on the ground floor of the building that has sat empty for more than five years.
“We don’t know who’s in there, but it looks like there may be some people squatting,” Upper said. “They made a fire in laundry bins. It was contained. There wasn’t a whole lot of damage. There was just a lot of smoke.”
Upper said responding to calls at the building “is not out of the norm” for firefighters, who had been called to the building twice this year.
Despite the relatively small size of the fires they’ve extinguished, the condition of the building adds to the risk firefighters face.
“You don’t want to not search the building for people in the community that are living there squatting, however, there is definitely a safety concern on our side,” he said, referring to the structural integrity of the building. In addition to using equipment such as a thermal imaging camera, Upper said firefighters try to enhance safety when responding to calls at the building by ventilating smoke to make it easier to see hazards, “and then it’s just a real extra caution type operation.”
Although he said the fire department can issue a demolition order, doing so could ultimately fall back on the city.
“If the city was to step in and do the demolition, that’s a huge cost to the community,” he said. “You really try to work with the owners to get that to happen.”
A permit to allow the demolition was issued by the city more than a year ago.
In a story published Sept. 20, developer Michael Corrado — a partner with property owner Queenston Oakdale Ltd. — said demolition could begin in the next few months.
“That’s what our goal is, before the end of the year to be back on site demolishing,” he said at the time.