A fire tore through a historic downtown Cumberland building Sunday night, heavily damaging a bike shop, displacing several hostel guests and sending one firefighter to hospital. Shasta Spalding was in the building next door when she heard a loud bang. She and others ran into the living room, where two boys came running out of bedrooms near the hostel. “People were screaming, ‘Get out! Get out of the house,’” Spalding said. They rushed outside and watched as flames climbed from the building, which houses a bike shop on the ground floor and a hostel upstairs. Spalding captured video of the fire, estimating the flames reached roughly 12 to 20 feet. “It was just so dramatic and scary,” she said. Clark Goble arrived as the first firefighter reached the scene. “I saw the flames inside the bike shop on sort of the bottom floor,” Goble said. “I could see some smoke kind of coming out of the side there.” He said the heat was intense enough to cause another startling sound. “You could hear the tires popping on the bikes from the heat and everything,” Goble said. Several people staying at the hostel were displaced by the fire. Ann Walker of Nanoose Bay was among them. She said the timing of the fire turned out to be fortunate for the people staying there. “We were all out of the building at a poetry reading,” Walker said. The guests were not allowed back inside. Firefighters helped retrieve passports and other belongings for them. Walker said some books belonging to poets and a publishing company were also inside and may have suffered smoke damage. “If it had just happened later at night, it could have been a different situation,” Walker said. “We would have all been in there asleep or whatever.” Cumberland Fire Rescue Chief Mike Williamson said the fire was discovered after alarms sounded and the duty officer went to investigate. “Somebody heard the alarms ringing,” Williamson said. “The duty officer came and checked it out and saw the fire in there.” Williamson said the fire appears to have originated in a section of the bike shop, where bikes, parts and other materials were stored. Crews evacuated the building, carried out searches and worked to keep the fire from spreading through the connected portions of the structure. Firefighters from Courtenay were called in to provide additional manpower. Williamson said crews faced a difficult job reaching pockets of heat throughout the building’s multiple rooms and roof structures. “The building still stands and the structure still stands,” Williamson said. “But everything inside it, the contents, are pretty much destroyed” in the affected section. One firefighter was injured while crews were working on the second floor. Williamson said the firefighter fell on a staircase in the dark, smoke-filled building and struck a post. The firefighter was taken to hospital by ambulance with a suspected shoulder dislocation. Despite the extensive interior damage, crews were able to contain the fire to the section where it started. Firefighters continued working to extinguish hot spots Sunday night. The cause of the fire remains under investigation.
