The fire that ripped through a Lynn Valley apartment complex this week killing a mother and her young son sent shock waves through the North Shore community.
Thanks to our excellent emergency services and modern building codes, it’s rare that a fire results in deaths. This week’s news has been devastating.
At this point the fire investigation is just getting started. We don’t know what caused it or why it spread so quickly. We do know that Mountain Village is an older wood-frame building and the fire broke out at the worst possible time – when families were home and asleep. Beyond that we are left with questions.
Sprinklers are not required in older buildings. But functioning smoke alarms are. We don’t yet know what the situation was in Mountain Village. We do know that if alarms were present, people didn’t hear them.
It’s hard to see light in such a heartbreaking situation, but the response of the community has been overwhelming. Everyone from the Lions Club to property managers to individual neighbours have pitched in to do what they can for families impacted by the fire.
Their generosity will ease the immediate burden of those families.
Long-term, there will be other issues. The fire ate up 17 units of relatively affordable housing in a community with next to none.
This week, however, we applaud the community for stepping up when they were needed. We can’t change the worst that has happened. But collectively we’ve shown our neighbours that we’ll walk with them a way on the long road ahead to recovery.
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