No timeline for families to return
Engineers need more time to examine scene of Caledon house explosion
The Ontario Fire Marshal’s office says it’ll be difficult to determine when the families surrounding a house explosion in Caledon on Sunday will be able to return to their homes.
“Right now, we have no gas to the area residents, they don’t have power, don’t have gas, some of them are structurally not safe to occupy,” said Andrea Gaynor, fire investigation supervisor for the office of the Ontario Fire Marshal and Emergency Management at the scene Monday morning.
Gaynor said it’s going to take several days for investigators to map out the debris field and categorize all the evidence they will need to figure out what happened when 9 Maple Grove Rd. exploded just after 6 a.m. Sunday.
Joseph Westcott, 54, was killed.
Gaynor said the information she has now is that at least 22 other homes have been damaged. Seven to nine have significant damage, which she said could involve fractured brick, roofs that have been raised and lowered again and walls that have shifted among other effects.
“Structural engineers will have to come in and look at all of that,” she said.
The investigators have laid out tarps near the home with pieces of barbecues, gas metres and other appliances carefully organized on them.
“We want to look at all the appliances that were fuel-pow- ered,” she said. “We’re going to take everything out of the basement, going to take a look at the furnace, the hot water tank, anything that was fuel-powered and we’re going to take a look at all of them.”
Asked if something other than gas is being considered for a cause, she said they have to be cognizant of all possibilities and don’t want to eliminate any- thing. She said the blast was a “high-order” blast with a pressure wave that was more than 1,000 metres per second, creating an extremely large debris field. Gaynor said another crew is walking the street, looking through the peripheral damage that occurred due to the blast. Their goal is to document everything so that the homes can hopefully be released back to the town, and the insurance companies.
“So hopefully they can start the process they need to do to look after these people,” she said.
Gaynor said her team has a number of different things underway, including waiting for Bell to come in and remove lines so that they can move heavy equipment in.