A house and garage were destroyed by fire in the wee hours of Friday morning on Old Fort Road in Aulac.
Point de Bute fire chief Wayne Wells says he received the call at 4:24am, and put in mutual aid calls to neighbouring fire services in Port Elgin, Amherst, and Sackville.
When CHMA spoke to Wells at about noon on Friday, the fire department was still at the site, dousing hot spots as they flared up. “It’s an old, big house,” said Wells, “so it’s going to be doing that for while.”
The house is a complete loss, said Wells. Firefighters were only able to fight the fire from the outside of the structure, as it was engulfed in flames when they arrived.
Nobody was living in the house, he said, and so there were no injuries associated with the fire.
The fire marshall had been to the site and left, said Wells, adding that they might be too much destruction to determine the cause of the fire.
Sackville Fire sent three trucks after getting the call from Point de Bute at around 4:30am Friday morning, according to fire chief Craig Bowser.
Old Fort Road is a rural area with no fire hydrants, so tanker trucks were filling up at a nearby lake on Trueman Mill Road.
After filling up once at the lake, Wells sent a Sackville tanker truck back to Sackville to fill up at a hydrant on Bridge Street.
On Thursday night, some residents of Bridge Street began complaining of discoloured or black water in their taps. This morning, the Town of Sackville posted on social media, tying the use of the fire hydrant on Bridge Street overnight to the discolouration issues.
As a result of the issues, the post reads, “our Public Works Department will be flushing water lines throughout the day to resolve the issue. This flushing may cause a decrease in pressure and discolouration in these areas. We apologize for any inconvenience that this work may cause.”
The timing of events doesn’t seem to add up, however, with water issues first reported Thursday night, and the fire hydrant not being used until sometime after 4:30am Friday morning.
Head of Public Works Dwayne Acton says that discolouration complaints on Bridge Street could also have been connected to last weekend’s water main break on Queens Road, or the use of a Bridge Street hydrant on Thursday night by the fire department during their weekly training exercise.
He says that the high velocity of water during a water main break essentially “scours” the pipes, and pulls off sediment that can then settle in the system. Even though Public Works flushed out pipes after the water main break last weekend, Acton says it nearly impossible to get 100% of the sediment cleared.
His theory is that when the fire department briefly used a Bridge Street hydrant during their training Thursday evening around 7pm, they “stirred up what sediment had already settled out in some of the pipes down in the the Lorne Street Bridge area.”
Acton says crews worked all day Friday flushing out the system around Bridge Street, including Squire and Weldon.
Acton said people may need to run their taps for a bit after the flushing is complete.
FIRE TRUCKS DISPATCHED EARLIER THURSDAY
Coincidentally, Sackville Fire had dispatched trucks to Bridge Street earlier on Thursday afternoon, at about 4pm.
Three trucks were sent to the CamTram building on Bridge Street, says Chief Craig Bowser, but happily, firefighters were not needed.
“Upon arrival it was determined that there was no active fire. It was a piece of equipment that created some issues and so there was no structure fire, there were no flames,” says Bowser. “And I can confirm that everyone evacuated the building properly. And there were no injuries.”
