Vancouver firefighters were stretched Thursday night, as they attended to two residential building fires simultaneously.
At 9:27 p.m. a call came in about a working fire that started in the kitchen of a top-floor suite of a two-storey walk-up apartment building on Granville Street at West 70th Avenue.
Assistant Fire Chief Ken Gemmill tells Global News fire crews arrived to find flames leaping out of a top floor window and the building’s roof.
Twitter video courtesy of Arda Yazgan
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Crews soon brought the fire under control, with fire damage limited to the single suite.
Two occupants of that suite were sent to hospital for treatment, one for 2nd-degree burns and the other for smoke inhalation.
The building’s other eight suites all suffered smoke and water damage, resulting in the building’s 25 occupants all being displaced.
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Minutes after that first fire call came in, Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services received word of another fire at the former Biltmore Hotel, now a social housing building, at 395 Kingsway near Prince Edward Street.
The fire apparently started in a sixth-floor suite of the hotel.
Fire damage to the suite was minimal, but the rest of the building took on a lot of water and smoke damage, displacing 20 of the Biltmore’s occupants.
In all, some 45 Vancouver residents are out of their homes because of these two fires.
The city’s Emergency Support Services is working with those residents to find them suitable accommodation.
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