A Dundarave home is in ashes and investigators are working to determine a cause after a threealarm fire Saturday night.
West Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services received multiple 9-1-1 calls just after 11 p.m. When they arrived at the home on the 2500-block of Ottawa Avenue, the house was fully engulfed in flames, too far gone to be saved.
But the immense size of the blaze prompted fire chiefs to sound a second and third alarm calling in a dozen trucks and close to 50 firefighters from the North Shore's three departments to help stop the fire from spreading throughout the neighbourhood of 1930s, '40s and '50s homes built on a steep slope.
"They were definitely needed on these fires because this home was burning so intensely that it caught the neighbouring home on fire and probably caused around $250,000 damage," said assistant fire chief Martin Ernst.
"Lots of trees burning here, houses burning there, gas lines burning. You could call it a real buffet of problems but our staff and our incident commanders did a great job in taking care of those problems. It was heading to be a worstcase scenario."
The levelled home had only recently been purchased and the owners were renting nearby while work crews renovated the home. The family next door will likely be displaced for six months while their fire-damaged attic is repaired, Ernst said.
"Once fire's into an attic, typically the home is going to burn down but luckily our firefighters are very skilled in attic fires and this one was caught early and. .. was put out before it spread to the rest of the home," he said.
The only reported injury was to a West Vancouver firefighter who was taken to hospital following the fire to be treated for a severed Achilles tendon.
"He described it as someone literally stabbing him the back of the leg with a knife or hitting him with a hammer but he's a very tough guy. He continued to work for an hour after," Ernst said. "As much as (the home) is a write-off, the good news is, nobody was sleeping there. No one was living there," he said.
There is no early indication as to cause, though fire department and insurance investigators will be on site digging through the wreckage and interviewing witnesses, contractors and the owners for the rest of the week, Ernst said.
Nothing indicates the fire may be suspicious, he added.
