Investigators are working to find the cause of a fire that levelled an industrial welding operation near Capilano University early Tuesday morning.
The first 911 calls came in around 4:45 a.m. when smoke was spotted coming from a steel shed on Monashee Drive.
District of North Vancouver Fire and Rescue Service crews arrived and quickly assessed it to be too dangerous to attack the source of the flames.
“It was immediately clear that it was defensive fire conditions,” said assistant fire chief Brian Hutchinson. “We only fought the fire from the outside based on the fact that there were multiple explosions taking place.”
Inside the shed were vehicles and tanks of propane, oxygen and acetylene off-gassing and exploding. Though the blasts could be felt in homes across the Seymour River in the Blueridge area, no one was hurt.
The canine inhabitants of the commercial dog kennel adjacent to the site also escaped harm, Hutchinson said.
“There are outside kennels there but the dogs had been moved into the building for the night so they’re all fine. No damage to the building. No smoke issues or anything like that,” he said.
It took firefighters more than two and a half hours to knock down the blaze.
“There was a lot of fuels,” Hutchinson said. “There were at least three large vehicles that the fire had extended to, and a lot of the material that was burning was in under a steel shed. … Because of the nature of material involved, it just takes time.”
There was early speculation that the fire may have been ignited by a lightning strike thanks to passing thunderstorm, but Hutchinson said that is unlikely.
“That seems a stretch to me at this point in time,” he said. “Just based on where we were, there was a large number of hydro towers that would seem to be more of an attractant to lightning than this steel structure.”
