Pitt Meadows firefighters put out a third fire in a rural area in just over a week on Sunday.
The fire department was dispatched out just before 2 a.m. Sunday to the 12800-block of Harris Road.
A barn was fully-involved by the time they got there.
“There’s a house here, but it doesn’t appear to be lived in right now,” said acting Pitt Meadows fire chief Mike Larsson, adding that the barn was around 100 metres from the house in a back field.
There was nothing in the barn at the time of the fire.
It took 16 members about five hours to contain the fire along Harris Road and put it out.
The cause is undetermined right now, but is being reviewed as suspicious, said Larsson.
“Because there is nobody here and it is an unattended barn,” he explained.
However, Larsson said, likely in such a fire, when it burns so hot and so intense, it’s difficult to determine how it started.
“The fact that it was the third barn fire in a week is a lot on our guys,” added Larsson.
Nine days before, there were two early morning fires in Pitt Meadows.
The first started just after midnight near Old Dewdney Trunk Road and involved two cattle barns. When firefighters arrived, one building was fully-involved with flames spreading to a second building.
The second fire took place at a former nursery on Ford Road Detour.
A witness warned the dispatcher that one of the buildings on the property was being used for storage and had two large tanks of diesel fuel for farm vehicles.
The other building had recently still been used as a licensed marijuana grow-op.
By the time firefighters arrived on scene, a large warehouse-like building was engulfed in flames and the roof of the structure had collapsed.
The three fires are not suspected to be related.
Both Pitt Meadows Fire and Rescue and the Ridge Meadows RCMP are investigating.
