North Bay fire crews are battling a major fire — and frigid temperatures – in the city's downtown core.
The fire appears to have started in an Oak Street restaurant just after midnight, Fire Chief Jason Whiteley told CKAT radio. Both Main Street and Oak Street are closed at this time.
“Crews tried to make an interior attack and found there was significant fire above them," Whiteley said. "For safety we backed the crews out and went into a defensive mode. We started concentrating on saving the buildings to the east and west of it.”
Those buildings house MPP Vic Fedeli’s office on one side and a nurse practitioner clinic on the other.
Firefighters were able to contain the fire to the one building for a time, though the roof has collapsed into the building.
He says there’s a partial occupancy upstairs on the Main Street side. He also said residents in one of the next-door buildings were evacuated and are staying in the transit terminal.
“Nobody’s been hurt, that we’re aware of right now,” he adds.
The fire has since spread to a second building.
"We were able to stop the fire at the Fedeli building but it's moved over into the building just to the east of it," Whiteley told CKAT, as reported by BayToday.ca. "We've had a couple of smoke explosions in a backdraft. All our efforts are in stopping the fire at the Cedar Tree Restaurant there. We've able to keep it so far, but the fire does have a good hold on that building."
Further, the fire chief said it appears the fire may have broken through the wall of the Cedar Tree, a Lebanese restaurant.
"So basically at the Cedar Tree is where we are trying to stop it right now. We are being hampered. Of course, it is a significant fire and we have the cold," Whiteley is quoted as saying. "We've been out here for almost seven hours now and the cold is starting to wreak havoc on some of the equipment we have, so we're trying to get fuel down for the trucks and so forth."
This is a developing story.
