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Racist graffiti repeat
Mosquitoes buzz in
Sockeye battle
More anti-Chinese racist graffiti has been found in Richmond city centre. And it bears all the hallmarks of last month’s slur on the Asian community.
Richmond City Baseball Mosquito Chuckers came within a whisker of provincial championship glory at the B.C.s in North Delta.
Local fisherman claim First Nations salmon bias.
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FIRE
Blaze survivors: Alarm never sounded in time Early morning inferno kills one tenant, displaces 93 BY NELSON BENNETT
nbennett@richmond-news.com
PHOTO SUBMITTED BY JEFF CHEN
Firefighters tackle the Westminster Highway blaze at its height in the early hours of Saturday.
PHOTOS SUBMITTED BY TREVOR LANGEVIN
The apartment fire rages, above and
© 2010 LEE BUCKLEY
Fire investigators survey the damage.
See more readers’ photos at www.richmond-news.com
Tenants who survived a fatal apartment fire Saturday want to know why it took so long for the building’s fire alarm to sound. One man in his 70s died in the blaze, which tore through the Heather Lee Apartments — a three-storey walkup at at 8540 Westminster Highway owned by Cressey — in the early morning hours Saturday. His name has not yet been released. Nooria Hussani had just returned with her three children from a friends to the apartment complex at 12:50 a.m. and could smell smoke in the building. But it took nearly an hour before an alarm sounded at 1:45 a.m., she said. By then, the building was already engulfed in flames. “It means the fire alarm (never) went on in time,” says Elana Vinarskaia, who lived on the bottom floor of the apartment complex, built in the 1970s. Even when it did sound, Vinarskaia said it appears to only have gone off on
the first floor, not the second or third. Hussani, who lives on the second floor, had returned from a party but had forgotten her unit key and cell phone. She went down to the first floor to try to wake a neighbour to use the phone, so she could call her husband, who was still at the family friend’s house. She and her children thought they could smell smoke, but didn’t think too much of it. They were unable to wake her neighbour so they went up to the third floor to see if anyone was awake. They noticed what they thought was smoke coming from under the door of unit 305. Since she didn’t hear a smoke detector sounding, she assumed the tenant had already dealt with the issue, and did not want to knock on a stranger’s door at one o’clock in the morning. The building has had numerous false alarms, she added. “That’s why I didn’t pull the alarm at the time,” she said. Hussani and her children — aged 14, see Coroner page 7
Horrific images will haunt fire victim for the rest of her life Elena Vinarskaia says she can’t get images of Saturday’s apartment fire out of her head. Vinarskaia had been over at a nearby friend’s apartment when she got a call from her 14-year-old daughter, who had been wakened by the fire alarm at Heather Lee Apartments. “I looked out the window and there was fire on the roof,” she said. She bolted home and arrived to see terrified tenants jumping from the second-storey balcony of her apartment building. $
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Mom traumatized by sight of dead body and blackened residents fleeing building “I can still see these people climbing down, completely black. They were on the asphalt, vomiting,” Vinarskaia said. She is also haunted by the image of the feet of an elderly man who died in the fire sticking out from under a covering. “I saw his body,” a still-shaken Vinarskaia told the News Monday. “This picture will be with me for the rest of my life.” While she’s grateful her 14-year-old daughter managed to escape, they now have no place to live.
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They literally escaped with nothing more than their cell phones and the clothes on their back. “We are all left without anything,” she said Monday. “I’ve been wearing these clothes for two days.” There are roughly 35 units in the apartment complex, which had to be evacuated. Two neighbouring buildings were also evacuated due to concerns about the structural instability of the Heather Lee Apartments. A total of 93 tenants were displaced by the
fire. It’s not known when, if ever, they will be able to return home. Roughly 100 people were put up at a local hotel for the weekend with funding from the provincial emergency services program. Local charities have helped with some essentials. The Tzu Chi Foundation has provided some families with blankets, instant rice and $200 food vouchers. But as of noon Monday, Vinarskaia and others were officially homeless. see Tenant page 6
8171 Westminster Hwy. (at Buswell, one block east of No. 3 Rd.) Walkway access also from Save-On Foods parking lot
Mon-Sat 8:45-6:30 Sun 10-5 (604) 780-4959
07283111
BY NELSON BENNETT
nbennett@richmond-news.com