The North Shore Inn supportive housing facility sustained damage in a fire late Sunday night.
Nelson Fire Rescue Service responded to reports of the fire at about 11:30 p.m. All on-duty members responded and six were called in from home.
“Crews got alerted by an alarm monitoring company that the alarms were activated at a building on the North Shore,” said Fire Chief Jeff Hebert.
The first crew to arrive saw smoke coming from exterior windows. Firefighters met with site personnel and learned the fire was in Room 7. All tenants had already been evacuated.
“The people that staffed the building did a good job of evacuating all the tenants, and they managed to get a fire extinguisher discharged in the room prior to our crews arriving,” added Hebert.
Firefighters then entered the building, located the room and worked quickly to knock down the blaze.
Crews then searched each additional room to confirm all occupants had evacuated. After searching and ventilating the rooms, crews used fans to clear the remaining smoke from the building.
Hebert said the blaze was contained to Room 7 and that damage to the rest of the building was limited to isolated smoke and water damage.
“Luckily, the rooms are pretty small, and we were able to keep it confined to the one room. So they had the fire knocked down within a minute or so of arriving on scene,” said Hebert.
“We were able to ventilate the building and we did an air quality check to make sure that there wasn’t any off-gassing of carbon monoxide, just so that everybody was able to return back to their rooms.”
He added that staff’s decision to deploy a fire extinguisher helped significantly.
“It’s a huge help. It buys us a lot of time. They were able to, though the fire wasn’t fully extinguished, they were able to knock the fire down into a more incipient stage, which then gives us time to arrive on scene and set up our operations.”
Eight firefighters responded to the incident with two fire apparatus, one command vehicl and one utility vehicle. No injuries were reported.
The cause of the fire remains under investigation.
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