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Second home in Mirror destroyed by fire in less than a month

Apr 9, 2018 | 11:46 AM

Investigators are looking into the cause of a fire that destroyed a home in Mirror early Sunday morning.

Lacombe County Fire Chief Drayton Bussiere says they received the call around 3:10 a.m. and upon arrival found the single-family home fully engulfed in flames.

“We had members from the Mirror Fire Department, Alix Fire Department and Clive Fire Department there,” says Bussiere. “The occupants of the home were away at the time.”

Bussiere says there were no injuries to firefighters, who were at the scene for over three hours, and that the two occupants of the home are now staying with family members.

In terms of a damage estimate, Bussiere pegs it to be in the $350,000 range as the house is a total write-off with some minor damage to the siding of an adjacent home.

“The cause and origin of the fire are under investigation right now,” adds Bussiere.

“What’s pretty common with houses that are fully involved like this is that the roofs and walls and stuff like that all fall into the inside of the house. So as they’re designed to do, they protect everything that’s underneath them. It’s a bit of a challenge to get the stuff that’s underneath those things extinguished, so we quite often, which we did on this one, have to bring in a track hoe to lift that kind of stuff out so we can extinguish the interior of the house.”

The challenge with fires like this one, Bussiere notes, is to protect adjacent buildings from suffering any extensive damage.

“There was a bit of damage to the siding to the house next door, but that is considered successful. Quite often as we’re seeing becoming more and more common, these fires are spreading from one house to another and so keeping it to one structure is a good thing.”

This is the second house fire in Mirror over the past few weeks and Bussiere admits it’s unusual to see two house fires in such a small community take place in such a short period of time.

“Nothing really that I can say for sure to connect the two fires, other than the fact that they were pretty close together,” he says. “Two fires in two weeks in a community that size is kind of irregular but we call these things average for a reason and so these may be the only two fires we have here for the next five years, so it’s kind of hard to tell right now.”

Bussiere says that fire also remains under investigation.