District of North Vancouver firefighters are crediting the quick actions of two upper Lynn Valley women with saving their neighbours’ home from a fire.
Chamberlain Drive resident Natalia Zamjitski first suspected something was amiss around noon Tuesday when she noticed birds fleeing the neighbours’ yard. Thinking it may be a bear scaring them, Zamjitski went outside for a closer look. There she heard the crackling of a fire quickly spreading on her neighbours’ cedar deck.
As soon as the 9-1-1 call had been made, Zamjitski and another neighbour Margaret Stec met in the front yard, deciding to tackle the blaze themselves.
“I just got a fire extinguisher and I ran,” Stec said. “The fire was quite tall. I was nervous. It was close to me.”
But Zamjitski remained calm and deliberate, hitting the fire with the extinguisher, Stec added.
“She’s such a smart woman,” Stec said of her neighbour. Neither had attacked a fire before, although Zamjitski, a mining engineer, had some classroom training in underground safety.
“That was theory. This was practice,” she said.
The close relationship among neighbours and fire extinguishers at the ready were key to saving the home, according to assistant fire chief Mike Cairns.
“A couple more minutes without them doing that, the whole back of that house would have been fully involved with fire. They were quick and decisive and that really saved their neighbours’ house,” Cairns said.
The homeowners were away at the time of the blaze.
The exact cause of the fire is still under investigation. Cairns said it’s possible it had been smouldering under the deck for some time before it quickly grew.
As a thank-you, firefighters dropped off some DNVFRS hats and T-shirts for their amateur counterparts. More formal letters of thanks from the chief will be in the mail soon, Cairns said.
The street is home to families from at least six different countries, but it remains close knit with neighbours keeping an eye out for each other, Zamjitski added.
“I’m so happy to live on this cul-de-sac,” she said.
Stec said she hopes people will learn from the near catastrophe and keep fire extinguishers charged and ready. “If you’re saving the neighbour, you’re also saving yourself,” she said.
Zamjitski expressed similar sentiment, adding her primary concern was the safety of the homeowners’ cat.
“Don’t be afraid. If you can do something, do something,” she said.
