Wednesday night’s fire inside the Mission Canadian Tire store is now considered to be suspicious.
According to a press release, the Mission RCMP have opened an active investigation.
Police are seeking any witnesses to the fire and asking them to come forward.
The release asks that if anyone was in the area of Canadian Tire, on London Ave., between 6-7 p.m. during the time of the fire and has dash cam footage, they should forward it to the Mission RCMP Detachment.
Anyone who may have witnessed anything suspicious in the area during the time of the fire are also urged to come forward with information.
The fire broke out inside the Canadian Tire store at about 6:30 p.m. on Jan. 30.
Mission Fire Rescue Service was called and quickly responded.
“Crews, when they arrived on scene, found smoke right to the floor, inside the structure,” said Mission fire chief Dale Unrau.
Firefighters located the blaze “within the racking.” It has been “mostly put out” by the in-building sprinkler system, explained Unrau.
“Firefighters completed extinguishing the fire and at this point in time are just ventilating the structure,” Unrau said on Wednesday night.
There were no injuries to report as staff and customers exited the store safely. No firefighters were injured during the blaze.
Unrau said there is no damage to the structure itself but the clean up will take time.
“The sprinkler system did a great job and extinguished the fire, but there’s lots of water throughout the store and smoke throughout the store as well, so I’m sure the building will be out of service for an extended period of time.”
Several hours later, at about 2 a.m. Thursday morning, firefighters were called out to the store again as a second fire began to burn.
“We’re not quite sure why we had another fire break out in there, but when we left after the first one, our fire investigators had already completed their investigation in the initial fire area and our crews that were ventilating the structure had gone through and done a final check with a thermal camera and everything was cold,” said Unrau.
He called it a mystery and noted that the Mission RCMP were on scene throughout the night, watching the structure until the morning when the police investigation team arrived.
Unrau said the fire is “definitely suspicious.”
“I have a big team of investigators digging through the rubble as we speak.”
