Investigators are considering a weekend fire at an abandoned house in Port Coquitlam to be suspicious.
Photograph by: NOW , file
It was a busy long weekend for emergency and rescue personnel in the Tri-Cities.
Investigators are considering a weekend fire at an abandoned house in Port Coquitlam to be suspicious. Fire crews were called to the two-storey home at 2024 Suffolk Ave. at 1: 30 a.m. Sunday.
Flames and heavy smoke were already showing when crews arrived at the scene. There was no one living in the home and the services had been shut off.
"It seemed a little suspicious that it was going that well in a place with no services and supposedly no one living in it," said PoCo fire chief Nick Delmonico, adding the exact cause of the blaze hasn't been determined.
There were no injures, but a good portion of the home was destroyed by flames.
Delmonico noted the department does occasionally deal with fires at abandoned homes, suggesting they're usually the result of squatters trying to cook or keep warm.
Meanwhile, members of Coquitlam Search and Rescue had their hands full with two rescues on Nov 11.
According to the organization's website, the first search started the night before when the team was contacted by Coquitlam RCMP to look for two missing boaters on Pitt Lake.
A campfire was spotted by air along the river, but ground crews attempting to reach the area were stopped by high water in the Pitt River. At daybreak, two SAR members assisted the missing boaters by winching their boat off the gravel bar they were stranded on.
Later that afternoon, Coquitlam SAR was called out to help rescue an injured mountain biker on the "Slayer" trail on Burke Mountain. The woman had broken her leg.
A dozen SAR members responded with first aid equipment and a stretcher.
The woman was eventually carried out to a waiting ambulance.
