Last Friday evening (Sept. 25) emergency crews responded to a fire at the 1100 block of Midday Valley Road, just past Houston Street.
They arrived at 9 p.m. to find the structure completely engulfed in flames, which had set some of the surrounding grass ablaze.
“When firefighters arrived, that’s what they came up against,” Merritt Fire Rescue Department Chief Dave Tomkinson told the Herald.
Already on the scene were Tyler Goeth and Ray Carriere, of Kelowna. They work at the nearby Merritt Green Energy Project.
“We were diving up Houston, and we saw a flash at first,” said Goeth, who said he was afraid it may have been one of the office trailers they use at work. “We kept going, and realized it was a house on fire,” he said. They called 911 and waited a few minutes for the fire department.
In the meantime they took footage of the fire. The video moves around the outside of the building, and the crackling of the fire is audible. “Where I was, you wouldn’t want to get any closer — I could seriously feel the heat,” said Goeth.
Carriere said once fire crews arrived, it took them about 20 to 30 minutes to douse the flame.
Tomkinson said the 25 firefighters who attended focused first on the grass fire before turning their attention to the single family residential structure.
“It was pretty intense,” he said.
Because of the isolated location, no other residential structures were in immediate danger.
Firefighters got back to the station at around midnight.
“Right now the [cause of the] fire has been deemed undetermined, but being that the structure was uninhabited at the time of the fire, it does appear to be somewhat suspicious,” Tomkinson said.
“No one else was driving by, no one even saw it,” said Carriere. “It was lucky we were there when we were.”
Tomkinson said the file has been forwarded to the local RCMP office for investigation.
