It will be several more days before sixth-floor residents forced out after fire ripped through an apartment in a public housing highrise near downtown London will be able to return home, officials said Sunday.
All tenants from the sixth floor of the apartment building at 241 Simcoe St. – operated by London and Middlesex Community Housing (LMCH) – are being housed in a hotel while restoration work continues at the building after the Saturday morning fire sent nine people to hospital, five with critical injuries, said the agency’s communications manager Matt Senechal.
“We’re staying in contact with everyone and providing updates, and we hope to have everyone back by midday on Wednesday,” he said.
The fifth-floor apartment directly below the unit that caught fire was also evacuated but its tenants were expected to return home earlier than midweek, Senechal said.
There was extensive damage to the unit that caught fire, and it will be a long time before the apartment could be lived in again, he said.
“What we’re doing is looking into a permanent relocation for that tenant.”
It’s unclear how many residents have been displaced due to the blaze, but the sixth floor has nineteen apartments, Senechal said.
Colin Shewell, a platoon chief with the London fire department, estimated on Saturday that as many as 20 people had been forced from their homes.
Firefighters were called to the 12-storey apartment building, southwest of the intersection of Wellington and Horton streets, at about 6:30 a.m. Saturday in response to a fire on the sixth floor, the fire department said in a statement posted to social media.
Sunday, Shewell said the fire did an estimated $300,000 in damage and noted the cause was still under investigation.
Senechal thanked emergency crews for their work battling the fire, saying the housing agency is “very appreciative of the support of first responders who responded to the scene effectively, swiftly ensuring the safety and minimizing the disruption of our tenants.”
The fire prompted London Health Sciences Centre to issue a code orange that is called “when an external disaster has occurred with multiple potential patients arriving at the hospital requiring a co-ordinated response,” the hospital says on its website.
Five people were in critical condition while four others were in stable condition as a result of the fire, Samantha Vollick of the Middlesex-London Paramedic Service told The Free Press on Saturday.
“A number of patients were assessed at LHSC” and “several remain in critical condition,” hospital officials said in an email statement on Saturday. Reached Sunday, hospital officials said they could not “provide a general update on the patients.”