A late morning fire completely destroyed a house and large storage shed near Rockwood on Jan. 9.
Township firefighters were called to the property at the northeast corner of Highway 7 and the 7th Line at 9:40am.
“When we confirmed that it was a working structure fire and it was showing it had extended through the roofs … we set up and did a defensive fire attack … we didn’t go inside,” deputy fire chief Jim Petrik said in an interview.
The house and shed were boarded up and unoccupied at the time of the fire. However, Petrik said the fire is not being treated as suspicious.
“It just doesn’t have the same … type of characteristics as some of the other suspicious fires that we’ve been to,” he said, referring to the rash of abandoned structure fires in Guelph-Eramosa and Puslinch towards the end of 2016.
“There’s people actively working on the building,” Petrik explained. “It’s not like it had just been sitting with no activity on it.”
The Office of the Fire Marshal, Guelph-Eramosa fire and the OPP are investigating the blaze, but have not yet determined a cause.
“We’re still trying to put out hot spots so we haven’t really been in it at all to address that, so we don’t really know,” Petrik said about five hours after the first call came in.
There were about 25 firefighters at scene in total, from stations in Halton Hills, Rockwood, Guelph, Erin, Fergus and Puslinch.
While battling the blaze firefighters needed boulders moved to give fire trucks easier access to the building. Petrik said a neighbour came to the scene with a front-end loader to clear the way and to pull doors off the shed to give firefighters an opening to fight the fire.
The house and shed were completely destroyed and Petrik estimated the damage at between $750,000 and $1 million.
No one was injured in the fire.
