Three blue HEPA 500 portable air-filtration fans continue to blast along the slim halls of the 19th floor of 395 Somerset St. W.
The fatal blaze that claimed the lives of
three residents
in Unit 1916 on March 14 has left a heavy smoky smell that even days later haunts the halls and stairwell of the Centretown highrise.
Some residents were displaced from their units into temporary housing. Dan Galarnyk, who lives on the 18th floor, directly below the unit where the fire occurred, was one of them. Water used to fight the fire started flooding his unit that night.
“I knew there was something serious happening because the (fire) suppression system came on,” he said Saturday. “I had half an inch to an inch of water in my living room.”
His living room carpet was soaked.
Galarnyk took his own preventive safety measures the night of the fire, rolling up a wet towel and placing it under his apartment entrance door to keep smoke from coming into his unit.
“I don’t know if it was the e-bike that caused the fire (in 1916), but I suspect it,” he said, adding that a resident he knew who lived in that unit at the time of the fire owned an e-bike with a lithium-ion battery
that fire investigators had been examining
as a possible cause.
In a news conference on March 15,
Ottawa Fire Services
spokesperson Nick DeFazio said that, while there was no confirmation that an e-scooter on the balcony of Unit 1916 had been the source of the fire, investigators from the Ottawa Fire Services and Ontario’s Office of the Fire Marshal were investigating it as a possible cause.
Daniel Byrne, an Ottawa-based pastor with Connecting Streams, said Saturday that volunteers had been checking in on residents of the highrise in the days since the fire.
“We’ve had some of our volunteers reaching out to the people that we know in the building throughout the week, including Dan (Galarnyk),” Byrne said. “Our volunteers have been trying to stay in contact with as many of the residents as possible.”
Galarnyk said he had been staying in a nearby hotel since the fire and only returned to his apartment unit on Friday.
“The people who have lived in the building have had it really rough,” Byrne said. “There’s been flooding in the patio. There’s been flooding in the community room … and there’s always security issues in that building, being close to downtown.”
“The fire was just one more thing,” he said. “It’s been a really difficult winter for people.”
Byrne described Connecting Streams as an organization that helped “equip and mobilize churches to walk alongside people in various forms of vulnerability,” including older residents living in the
Ottawa Community Housing
building at 395 Somerset St. W.
“We’ve been there, walking alongside the community, for about eight years,” Byrne said. “We do a group called Friends at Somerset every Monday night.”
Byrne said the pro-social community event was a non-religious initiative that taught residents what it meant to be a good neighbor.
“We celebrate birthdays, play some games. Sometimes we’ll have outside musicians come in … but it’s really about developing a sense of community because it’s a really tough community to live in for a number of reasons.”
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