A sensitive sniffer helped alert a Royal City resident to the possible presence of fire before smoke appeared.
Fire crews attended a three-storey apartment on Sixth Avenue about 9: 30 p.m. on Tuesday, August 14, after a female tenant smelled fire.
"She apparently has a sensitive nose. She smelled smoke," said fire inspector Brent Joel. "She went into the hall and couldn't see anything. She checked everything out."
The woman and her partner, who live on the second floor of the building, continued to smell smoke even though they couldn't see fire anywhere and no alarms were sounding. Again, she hunted for a possible fire.
"She opened up the cupboard under her sink and smoke started coming out," Joel said. "She called us."
Other than the smoke in the kitchen cupboard, firefighters could find no evidence of fire.
Suspecting the fire may be in the wall, the captain pulled the building's alarm and evacuated the apartment.
Crews opened up the wall and found no sign of fire, but they found charring on a small piece of wood in the ceiling of the suite below the woman's apartment.
"It had charred the boards. It was catching fire," Joel said of an area that has no electrical plugs. "Lo and behold, there is a wire in there in the bulkhead over the kitchen cabinet. You can see where the wire is burnt on the end."
New Westminster Fire and Rescue Services has called in a certified electrician to examine the wire and determine what it was for and why it caught on fire. The fire caused about $4,000 worth of damage.
Although the tenant smelled smoke, no fire alarms or smoke detectors were sounded until the fire department arrived and physically set off the alarm.
According to Joel, the tenants had removed the in-suite smoke detector from the wall in the second floor suite, and the smoke detector in the first floor suite was found not to be working.
"A fire watch has been ordered because the building's emergency systems are unsure. They are not functioning the way they should," Joel said. "The one we tested in the first floor suite did not work."
An independent contractor had inspected the apartment building's fire systems a week before the fire. As part of that process all alarms and extinguishers would have been tested.
Given that the building is a wooden construction three-storey walkup with no fire separations between the walls, Joel said the tenants were lucky that the fire was caught early.
"She (the tenant) has indicated it was a couple of hours from when she first smelled it and opened the cabinet doors," Joel said. "Had they gone to bed - who knows?"
