A fire broke out on a balcony of a Courtenay apartment building on July 14.
Witnesses shared photos of the fire, which was in the Glenhart Views building, located on Ryan Road.
"I got woken up by the fire alarm around 1:20 a.m." said witness Jackson Kirby, who lives down the hall from the affected apartment. "I walked out of my apartment and the whole floor was smoky and smelled like burnt plastic. I evacuated the building and saw the deck with water spraying off of it."
The water was spraying from a sprinkler system set up on the balconies in the building.
"The sprinkler system activated and kept it from spreading to any additional units, but the pickup of the wind last night was particularly what made it a little bit stubborn for sprinkler to do a better job there," said Courtenay deputy fire chief Jonathan Welsh. "Outside sprinkler systems are separate from the interior. There's a wet system on the inside, a dry system on the outside. That separate system activated, and we only had to isolate one single floor of the sprinkler system."
Fire crews used a deck gun out of the fire engine initially, until crews were able to get to the unit and attack the fire from inside the apartment. Deck guns are aim-able, controllable high-capacity water jets used for initial attacks. The crews did not need to use the ladder truck for this fire.
The fire was on the fifth floor of the building, and was limited to one balcony in one unit. Welsh said that the cause was likely smoking material, like cigarettes.
There were no injuries, but Welsh said that some elderly tenants were checked on by BC Ambulance for smoke inhalation.
"Hydro crews arrived and emergency social services to assess the situation and see if anybody needed to be relocated, which nobody needed to be," Welsh said. "So that was also good."
Kirby said he was able to return home after the fire was extinguished.
