A house fire in Cache Bay on Saturday evening, April 24, destroyed the Young Street home of Line Bigras and Roch Rochon. The family lost all household possessions, is currently homeless and staying at a hotel in Sturgeon Falls with their children Alex, age 9, and Brièle, age 6.
Fire chief Richard Maranda says their home’s contents were a total loss. He adds the fire is not suspicious, but the cause has yet to be determined. “We got the call at 11:01 p.m. on Saturday night… It was a one-and-a-half storey house.”
According to Maranda, the fire started at the front part of the house and when his crew got there, the home was fully involved. Fortunately, the family was safe as they had been out when the blaze started. “It’s a weird thing… When they got home, the neighbour yelled at them that there was a bear in the backyard. The lady went into the house and the husband went to try to scare the bear off – I don’t even know if he saw it or not.” Maranda says it wasn’t an explosion, but the spread of the fire was rapid. “They were towards the back; the main entrance is in the back of the dwelling. … When we got there, no bears, but the front of the house was fully involved.”
Two fire stations responded, Station 1 Sturgeon Falls and Station 9 Cache Bay, with 18 fire fighters attending. The main pumper left the scene at 2:15 a.m. While the crew managed to put out the flames, it was too late to save the home and its contents. The family was renting the house and they are now out of a home and without anything but the clothes on their backs.
“We’ve got four people displaced. Whether there was anything salvageable in the house I do not know, but there was quite a bit of smoke, heat and water damage…. They had a dog, but the dog was with them,” says the chief, adding that the vehicles on site were also safe.
