Fire crews in two Metro Vancouver municipalities were kept busy in the early hours of Saturday morning with unrelated fires.
In Burnaby, dozens of people spent the night sheltering on a transit bus after a two-alarm fire broke out at the 401 Inn on Boundary road.
Assistant Fire Chief Greg Young said crews were called to the motel shortly after 2 a.m., and had to rescue one occupant from a balcony.
“It was quite chaotic when they arrived,” he said.
Three people were taken to hospital for smoke inhalation, he said.
The fire was limited to a single unit, but three of the motel’s units were damaged enough that they couldn’t be reoccupied, he said.
In Surrey, crews had their hands full with a three-alarm fire at a concrete mixing company.
Neighbours phoned 911 around 4 a.m., after hearing loud bangs coming from the site near 192 St. and Highway 10.
Assistant chief Steve Serbic said firefighters arrived to find a 20,000 square-foot building fully engulfed, and immediately took a defensive posture to protect propane tanks on the site.
“There may have been some propane tanks that exploded, but all the big tanks on the site were managed by the crews,” he said.
“That was one of the first things they went to protect.”
Serbic said no workers were on site at the time of the fire, and no one was hurt.
The cause of both fires remain under investigation.
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