Maple Ridge fire investigators haven’t finished sorting through the burnt embers and timbers from one of the largest fires in the city in the last few years.
The old Mussallem Motors building on 223rd Street and Lougheed Highway caught fire Friday, Nov. 10, and turned into a raging inferno that took firefighters hours to put out.
Maple Ridge fire chief Howard Exner said his crews were on scene all last weekend.
Now they’re waiting for the walls of the burned out hulk to be reinforced so they can get inside the building safely and complete their investigation, something which should happen early next week.
“It’s the same kind of thing as we do at any structure fire,” said Exner.
Once they’ve gathered all the evidence, firefighters will write a report. But currently, no conclusions have been drawn about the cause of the blaze.
The building housed a home improvement company that did home renovations such as flooring, kitchens, bathrooms and windows.
“There’s a lot of construction material in the building,” Exner said.
There’s no evidence to support that anyone was living in the building, he added.
He said that it was one of the larger fires in Maple Ridge in the past few years, comparing it to the Sunrise Apartments fire in 2015.
Twelve fire trucks and 60 firefighters battled the blaze at its peak.