A fire that destroyed several units in a stalled townhouse complex in Stony Plain may have been deliberately set.
The fire broke out late Wednesday night and raged into Thursday morning, consuming 16 townhomes and damaging 14 more in the Sommerville Springs development, located near Golf Course Road on the south side of the town west of Edmonton.
READ MORE: Inferno destroys 16 townhomes in stalled Stony Plain subdivision
The town said the preliminary investigation has indicated the cause of the fire “could be suspicious.” In an update Friday morning, the town said RCMP have hired a private fire investigator to come in and work with the local fire department.
The fire broke out in a new development of duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes located in a field between the Southridge and High Park neighbourhoods.
The homes were all in various stages of construction. The town said only a few units had drywall installed, and most were framed and unprotected.
Work on the site came to a halt some time ago and town manager Tom Goulden said they have “grown increasingly frustrated with those associated with the development.”
“What began as an interesting project slowly became a site that challenged our organization and residents,” he said in a statement on Friday morning.
“Deficiencies in infrastructure and building construction required the Town to stop the project through our contractual legal authority. Further, portions of the land ended up in a judicial sale process which is only now being resolved. The Town has been monitoring the judicial process through our solicitor and understands that by the end of this month, portions of the land may be under new ownership.”
Goulden said the town has conducted engineering assessments of the infrastructure and is utilizing the developer’s required credit line to carry out specific upgrades in order to bring the servicing up to Stony Plain’s standards.
Even though many units were in various stages of construction, the site had no functioning fire hydrants and roads had not been paved. When the fire broke out, tankers were used to truck in water to help extinguish the blaze.
The town also hired engineers to review the building codes at Sommerville Springs, in order to have a better idea of construction standards of the existing structures. Goulden said they expected to receive reports on that assessment shortly.
A 2016 story by the Spruce Grove Examiner said after the project was abandoned, the town put up fences around the vacant site because it was becoming a target of vandalism and a safety concern.
Goulden said with a portion of the land soon to be changing hands, town staff hope the new ownership group will share Stony Plain’s “values of pride, safety and a commitment to quality construction and development.”
“Those associated with the site to this point simply have not shared these values nor shown any form of commitment to those values or this community,” he concluded.
No one was injured in the fire. Stony Plain is about 25 kilometres west of Edmonton in Parkland County.
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