Fire breaks out on Burnaby Mountain near Trans Mountain tank farm
Posted January 19, 2019 8:41 pm.
Last Updated January 20, 2019 1:34 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
BURNABY (NEWS 1130) – A late night fire at a commercial storage shed on Burnaby Mountain Saturday night could have been worse if it spread faster.
It took about 30 firefighters around 45 minutes to put out the flames on Aubrey Street near Pinehurst Drive after the workshop caught fire before 8 p.m.
The blaze was just a few hundred metres away from Kinder Morgan’s tank farm, but it was contained and put out quickly.
But Assistant Fire Chief Barry Mawhinney says the proximity to the tank farm wasn’t too concerning.
“There was really no danger to any other structures or Kinder Morgan. We had notified their security because we were within 400 metres of the property,” he says. “We were quite a distance away. The wind wasn’t really a factor for us. Being that it rained last night, even the greenspace around the area wasn’t really causing a hazard for us.”
Mawhinney says with the fire being at the top of a hill, there were some challenges fighting the flames.
“Because of where it was, and because of the elevation of the hill, we laid hundreds of feet of hose here, and we had to put a pump in between the hydrant and the top of the hill.”
No one was hurt and no other homes or buildings were damaged.
Flames light up night sky
The fire could be seen from miles away.
Witnesses who saw the flames before crews were able to extinguish them described seeing flames shooting up into the air over the trees, leaving an orange haze in the otherwise dark sky.
