No one injured after fire tears through Thorold home Monday night

A newly moved-in tenant is without a home after a fire destroyed a residence near Merritt Road and Highway 406 on Monday night.

Emergency crews responded to the scene at approximately 11:20 p.m. with six fire trucks to find the building engulfed in flames.

“I was just going to bed and all of a sudden you hear sirens. And you could tell by the amount of sirens that it was not just a false alarm or anything,” said a neighbour.

Neighbors reported seeing an orange glow in the sky and hearing a significant number of sirens as the first and second stories of the home were overtaken by heavy smoke and fire.

“There was heavy smoke and fire on arrival on both the first and second stories of the building,” said Mike DeGasperis, deputy fire chief of Thorold Fire and Emergency Services.

Firefighters faced challenging conditions as they worked to prevent the blaze from spreading to adjacent properties.

“Last night the wind was extremely bad and really, really strong heading towards the east,” DeGasperis said, noting that crews were able to contain and knock down the fire quickly despite the wind.

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The occupants of the home managed to evacuate safely before emergency crews arrived.

However, a neighbor and friend, Winn Opatovsky, said the tenant had just moved their belongings into the home from a storage unit. 

Opatovsky noted the tenant had been helping the landlord with renovations and that “everything she owned … it’s all gone now.”

Fire investigators have determined that the home sustained upwards of $800,000 in damage. 

Due to the extreme nature of the destruction, the origin and cause of the fire cannot be determined.

The property remained boarded up Tuesday morning.

The neighbourhood off of Highway 406 was built in 2020.

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