Kirk is a resident of Tuscarora and left his apartment near Parent Avenue after hearing a popping sound outside. “I crossed the street and I seen the big flames. I felt the heat as I was walking out of my front door and I just went holy ****,” Kirk said. Chief Prevention Officer John Smith says a smoke alarm in a second-floor room alerted those in the house of a fire. “The unfortunate thing when they got to the bedroom, this is the occupant, they decided to pull a mattress that was on fire out the stairs, out to the front porch,” he said. According to Smith, dragging through the house helped spread the flames and created a worse outcome. He says the best thing to do in that situation is just close the bedroom door. “Evacuate the house, call 911 and let fire take care of it and that would have probably contained maybe less damage and contained that fire to the bedroom,” Smith told CTV News. Two people were sent to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries and damage has been estimated at $400,000. According to Smith, the single-family home operates with individually rented rooms, and five rooms were recently fitted with smoke alarms following a complaint-driven inspection. “If you’re going to rent out rooms to individuals, at least have a working smoke alarm in that room on top of the smoke alarm and CO requirements in the rest of your house,” Smith advised. Had smoke alarms not been installed, the outcome might have been different, which is why city Coun. Mark McKenzie is calling for more discussion on the conversion of homes into boarding houses. “There isn’t a housing crisis. There’s an affordability crisis and so now people are resorting to renting rooms instead of actually being able to rent their own apartment and I don’t know if that’s what this was, but I know that we do have them,” he said. Last year the city paused rental licensing in Wards 1 and 2 to launch a review of city-wide options. The pilot required landlords to register their properties and undergo inspections to improve housing conditions and fire safety. Asked whether the RRL should be revisited, McKenzie said, “We just need more people to just comply with the rules, right? Because at the end of the day, we just want to make sure that people are safe.”
