Staff
A Five-Mile Dock Road residence was destroyed in an early-morning fire yesterday.
“Nobody was in the house at the time, it was unoccupied, so we had a full force of 12 of our firefighters and three of our fire trucks go and respond,” noted Couchiching deputy fire chief Christine Jourdain.
The Couchiching Fire Department was paged out around 6:15 a.m.
While firefighters had the blaze under control by about 7:30 a.m., Jourdain said the residence was “totally destroyed.”
The cause of the fire is still not known, she added.
“From our understanding, the neighbours looked out at around 5 and 5:30 a.m. and hadn’t seen anything,” Jourdain noted.
“Around 6 o’clock or so [was] when they looked out again, and saw the smoke and the flames coming out through the roof.
“So it was right in the centre of the house so nobody could see it until it broke through the roof,” she explained.
The residence was home to Marshall Jourdain, who was the only individual occupying the unit.
“But he had had plans to have his, at some point, family—his daughter and her kids—move in there when the time came for him to leave, and now we have no residence at all for them to come in to to live,” Christine Jourdain said.
“We haven’t yet spoke with Marshall on his own, but I imagine we will be setting something up because he lost everything in the fire,” she said.
“Everything was totally destroyed, nothing at all [was] salvageable,” she stressed.
Anyone interested in making a donation can contact Christine Jourdain at the Couchiching band office (274-3228).
