BRAMPTON, Ont. – A major fire at a Brampton townhouse spread throughout the entire complex, destroying at total of eight homes overnight.
The fire broke on Darras Court, near Bramalea Road and Balmoral Drive around 10 p.m. Saturday.
All residents escaped safely, thanks to the quick actions of a neighbor who saw the flames from his bedroom window.
READ MORE: Brampton townhouse blaze displaces 8 families, destroys homes
“I saw the fire happening and I went into that house and I told the gentleman to get his car out of the driveway and I’ll go get his family,” said neighbour Derek Dabor.
“I then went to the left side … banged on the door, got in there and got their family out – they had a little baby – and then I went to the other side and I literally had to kick the door in to get inside and get that family out because they just didn’t know what was happening.”
No one was injured physically in the fire, but the members of the community are terrified after the fire.
Parveen Thaper owned unit number 9, the last unit to be engulfed in flames. She told Global News when she saw the fire she never expected it would hit her home.
“I couldn’t believe this happened to me. I never imagined when I saw the first fire in unit 21, I couldn’t imagine it would come this far away,” she said.
“I thought it would maybe hit a couple of houses. I just stood there seeing my house burn.”
A single mom with two adult children, Thaper said she has no house insurance to cover the loss of her home.
She and her children are currently living in a shelter, but it is only temporary. Thaper added that she is concerned about what will happen in the long-term.
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“This was my first home, it really hurt me,” she said.
Thaper’s son Emmanual Teji is an actor and filmmaker. He was working on a documentary during the past few months and all of his equipment and footage was inside the home.
“It was a film project I was working on for four months. I spent a lot of money … I was working a warehouse job to fund myself and my equipment,” he said.
“I had upwards of $10,000 of equipment and stuff and it’s not just that, the content of the film is lost.”
Now Teji and his sister Victoria will have to put their lives on hold to find jobs and start re-building their lives from scratch.
The Ontario Fire Marshall’s office is investigating the cause of the fire. But what is clear is the units that were damaged were not properly fireproofed, which was reportedly set to be done in January.
But according to residents in the complex, the outer town homes in the complex were fireproofed.
A massive blaze six years ago that destroyed eight homes in the same complex prompted calls for fireproofing of those town homes.
“In this instance the fire originated in the garage of unit 21,” Fire Investigator Kevin Pahor told Global News.
“Then from that point the fire was able to vent out of the garage and attack the roofline and once it got to the roofline it was able to spread to the other units.”
Pahor added that the buildingswere scheduled to have their “fire separations” updated, which is a separation between units made to help prevent fires spreading.
“These units did not have the fire separations installed,” Pahor said. “So the fire was able to go from one unit to the next.”
Teji said he wants answers to what happened, and why their home burned down. He says he plans on discussing the matter with the management company in charge of the townhouse complex.
“I feel like you don’t get any answers, you don’t know who to talk to,” he said.
“Nobody contacts you, you can’t contact anybody. It’s like a language barrier … and if I could speak to them … I would say you didn’t do you job to ensure the safety of our lives, because we could have potentially died in there.”
Teji added that he believed his family is the only one without insurance, so they will get no compensation for the loss of their home and the contents inside.
He set up an online fundraising campaign to raise money for the family so they can get out of the shelter and find a more permanent place to live.
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