Firewood stacked too closed to a woodstove caused a fire in a central Nanaimo garage early Friday.
Crews were called out to the blaze in a detached garage on St. David Crescent around 1:50 a.m.
Ennis Mond, fire investigator with Nanaimo Fire Rescue, said there were flames showing at the back of the building upon arrival.
Once the blaze was extinguished, he found a pile of burnt firewood stacked close to the woodstove. Radiant heat caught the wood on fire and the fire travelled up the pile to a shelf of lawn furniture and some plastic totes before going through the roof.
“It took basically the back corner, the back wall out, the roof,” said Mond.
Everything in the garage was damaged by heat and smoke and the homeowner had no insurance, he added.
Mond said fire crews responded to some other preventable fires this week, including putting out a mattress fire on Rosehill Street caused by smoking materials Friday morning and an electrical fire on Bowen Road caused by improper use of an extension cord.
The Bowen Road fire happened in a duplex on Thursday afternoon.
He said the tenants had plugged a freezer into the extension cord and then plugged that cord into the wall. Too much power was running through the cord and it overheated and caught fire.
“Appliances should be plugged directly into an outlet,” said Mond.
