The fire early Tuesday morning at the Blue Heights commercial complex, on Highway 97 in Kelowna, was so serious the Kelowna Fire Department put out a general alarm requesting all fire personnel, even those off duty, respond.
However, we will likely never know what sparked the massive blaze.
The investigation has wrapped up with the cause officially listed as “undetermined.”
“Because of the extent of the fire damage and the collapse of the roof, it really hampered our investigation,” said Kelowna Fire Department investigator Jason Twamley.
“We didn’t find anything suspicious. We could pinpoint it to an area, but to say where it exactly started and what caused it, there was just too much damage.”
The blaze completely destroyed the Kelowna location of a local specialty sports retailer: Innerspace Watersports.
“It took a long time to build the presence that we were in Kelowna. We were just to the point, after toughing out a decade and a half, that a lot of people knew where we were,” said Interspace Watersports owner Chad Edwards.
“Our biggest concern with the fire is after you build presence in a community is that if someone rolls into your parking lot or sees that the building is leveled to the ground, they might just think that you are no longer in operation.”
That’s not the case. The business still has another store in Vernon.
Innerspace Watersports is hoping its Kelowna customers will travel to the Vernon location for now.
Meanwhile, the retailer is wading through the insurance process and finding it challenging.
Edwards said he thought his business was prepared for the worst, but after the total loss of the Kelowna store, he’s advising other business owners to make an extra effort to thoroughly document and take pictures of their businesses for insurance purposes.
“For instance, our hard drives and servers and stuff were inside the building that burnt so now they are asking us for documentation, but the information went up in the flames,” said Edwards.
“No one ever really thinks, ‘Is this going to happen?’…You’ve got to take a step back and look at other angles that you might not have thought of before stuff like that happens.”
What remains of the charred building, including Innerspace Watersports’ former Kelowna shop, is expected to be demolished.
There were also other commercial spaces in the destroyed building, including a business legally growing marijuana.