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.
The Office of the Fire Marshal, Guelph-Eramosa fire officials and the OPP investigated the blaze.
On Jan. 11 Fire Chief John Osborne confirmed the investigation was complete and the cause is undetermined.
“We couldn’t find a definitive cause,” said Osborne, who confirmed the fire is not related to previous suspicious fires in the area.
There were about 25 firefighters at the scene in total, from stations in Halton Hills, Rockwood, Guelph, Erin, Fergus and Puslinch.
Petrik said a neighbour with a front-end loader moved boulders and pulled doors off the shed to provide firefighters easier access to the building.
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.
