Christmas lights helped guide more than a hundred residents out of a building left in darkness following an early morning fire.
Fire crews were called to a 15-storey building at 728 Princess St. about 2:30 a.m. on Dec. 2. Princess Tower was left without power after a fire occurred in a panel in the electrical room.
“The building was pitch black. It was cold out. It was the middle of the night,” said Fire Chief Tim Armstrong. “The majority of the tenants in there were elderly. I’d say 75 per cent of them were well over retirement age.”
When New Westminster firefighters arrived at the apartment building, they saw smoke coming out of an electrical room on the fourth floor.
Armstrong said the building was “totally dead” as there was no lighting, the elevators weren’t running, the alarm panel wasn’t working and the backup electrical systems weren’t working. The building, which is attached to Royal City Centre, purchases its power from the mall.
“They have a main distribution that comes into the building there and then it goes to the tower. They had a short in the main electrical panel. It was in the electrical room, which supplied a number of different areas within the development. The electrical panel that was affected was just for the highrise,” Armstrong explained. “What ended up happening was the backup generator kicked in because the power went out for the building, but it couldn’t feed power to the building because the wiring had burnt out.”
Initially, Armstrong used a public address system to tell tenants to remain in their units until firefighters arrived and assure them that there was no risk to them. When it was determined it could take a few days for repairs to be made and power to be restored to the building, residents needed to be evacuated from their homes for their safety.
“A lot of them were sound a sleep so they didn’t even realize what was going on,” Armstrong said. “There was a bit of smoke in the building, but not a lot.”
Although the crews could get up and down the stairwells with flashlights, they knew it would be more challenging to evacuate seniors with limited lighting.
“I thought, ‘how are we going to light this thing up?” Armstrong said. “I said, ‘let’s get some Christmas tree lights.’”
Armstrong went to Lowe’s in Queensborough, where the night staff was busy stocking shelves. The fire department got 10 100-foot strings of white Christmas lights.
“We plugged it into our rigs and the crews walked up the stairwells around and around and around with the Christmas tree lighting,” he said. “We had both stairwells lit from top to bottom.”
According to Armstrong, firefighters evacuated 127 residents from the highrise, including 22 who had mobility issues.
“I think we carried 22 residents down,” he said. “They (firefighters) were up and down the stairwells. I think we got out of there around noon the next day. It was a big undertaking.”
Emergency Support Services attended the scene, and help coordinate cabs or rides from relatives, as well as accommodations for residents who were evacuated from their homes, Armstrong said.
Armstrong was unsure when residents would be allowed to return home, but had been told it would take a minimum of two to four days to fix the electrical systems.
“The damage was extensive,” he said. “They had to replace the entire fire alarm panel, the whole electrical distribution panel for the highrise, some cabling needed to be replaced with the main feeds coming into the building.”
For Armstrong, the timing was ironic, as he’d just been talking with city and fire staff about the possibility of doing an evacuation exercise in the city. Instead, crews got a chance to do a real-time exercise – guided by Christmas lights.
“That’s a first for me,” he laughed. “If it had been June I might not have had as much finding Christmas tree lights.”
