SUNDRE - When a sudden blaze engulfed a storage shed in barely a few blinks of an eye threatening the adjacent home, a Sundre resident feared the worst.
“I’m surprised it didn’t blow up, to be honest,” said Tammi Johnson, who has for more than three years been renting a property on the west side of 10th Street SW across the road from the Candre cannabis production facility.
“It was pretty scary,” Johnson said during an interview at the home as she showed the scene of the aftermath from the Tuesday, Nov. 19 incident.
“Because I had a construction heater full of diesel, there were big containers of commercial weed killer” as well as some 10 propane tanks sitting on a table nearby, she said.
With winter’s early arrival, Johnson was working throughout the night to clean up the property with some help from a friend.
“I knew the snow was coming, and so I had him over, and we were working diligently through the night trying to get the yard cleaned up before the snow came,” she said.
The single mother of two teenagers has been in Sundre since 2013 and is working to start a new and used clothing store called Head to Toe next to Subway in the location of the former smoke shop. She said she originally had rented a neighbouring building in a bid to open a new and used furniture business.
“I tried for about a year to get the building clean enough because it’s an old welding shop,” she said.
However, that plan did not pan out, and plenty of furniture and other items ended up outside in the yard, which she sought to clear out and place into other storage sheds and trailers on the property before winter’s grip took hold.
“I didn’t want everything frozen to the ground, I mean it looks like a junkyard here, it’s quite embarrassing,” she said, adding she wanted to tackle the task at hand.
“I like to work at nighttime actually, because I seem to get more done. I don’t have to worry about my phone!”
But disaster struck shortly after she turned on a light fixture in the shed closest to the house.
“It’s weird because I had left that light on night and day by accident for a week at a time before, and nothing had ever happened.”
However, just moments after switching the light on and making her way to a trailer to grab a piece of furniture, she turned around to see flames already shooting several feet above the shed’s roof.
Her thoughts immediately focused on all of the flammable items nearby, fuelling concerns about a potential explosion with her son and daughter still in the house.
Shouting to her friend to grab the garden hose, Johnson said she rushed inside to get her kids before coming back outside to help.
“He was having trouble with the hose; he was panicking,” she said.
Meanwhile, across the street at the Candre facility, a security guard on the night shift had just started a physical foot patrol of the building’s perimeter to ensure the site was secure when he observed the fire shooting up into the night sky.
“It was four in the morning; most people are asleep,” said Tom Campbell.
“So I just wanted to make sure that whoever was in that house was awake and knew what was going on. I just reacted.”
With prior experience serving as an assistant chief in B.C. for a volunteer rescue organization that carries out vehicle extrications and rescues, as well as some time working security at a homeless detox shelter in Saskatoon, Campbell has over the years developed an instinct to assess emergency situations and react accordingly.
“When I approached the house, the two occupants were just heading out,” he said.
Johnson’s friend was making his way around back with the hose and Campbell asked Johnson whether there was anyone still in the house.
“She asked me to turn on the hose while she checked on the kids,” he said, adding that afterwards he returned to the front door to make sure everyone was OK.
“They were just getting their stuff together.”
After the kids and pets were safely out of the house, Campbell went around back with Johnson to check on her friend.
“That’s when I noticed it was the shed and not the house” that was on fire, he said.
“But there were propane bottles and debris around.”
So Campbell proceeded to help move away from the fully engulfed shed as many flammable items as possible.
Shortly afterwards, the Sundre Fire Department’s chief, Marty Butts, arrived on scene with the command truck.
“When the fire chief showed up, the fire was really starting to take off and there wasn’t much more I could do,” said Campbell, adding he also had to return to his job and so went back to his post.
Speaking as someone with prior rescue services experience, Campbell praised Sundre’s fire department.
“I was really impressed with the town’s quick fire response,” he said, adding he was just happy no one was hurt and that the house was saved.
Johnson agreed.
“They’re great,” she said about Sundre’s volunteer firefighters.
“I’m really grateful, I wish I could…‘thank you’ just doesn’t cut it.”
Unfortunately, the contents of the shed were not covered.
“I didn’t have insurance, and I lost thousands of dollars' worth of tools,” she said, explaining she had previously done some work for a local real estate agent doing property management.
“This is my livelihood that’s gone. I’m not even sure how I’m going to recover from this.”
As glad as she was about the outcome — which all things considered could have been much worse — she’s already started tabulating a mental list of the items lost.
“It really sucks,” she said.
Plus, the remaining cleanup effort will at this point have to wait until spring, she added.
Yet despite the difficult situation, Johnson seemed to reserve some optimism.
“I do believe that everything happens for a reason,” she said.
“I think there’s a lesson to be learned here for me too. Even if it’s just to carry insurance, and be more careful.”
A disaster does not take long to unfold; a few minutes were all it took, she said.
“If we had been sleeping, there are just so many other outcomes that could have happened.”
