PG Fire Chief continuing to look for answers after recent stretch of structure blazes

Investigations are ongoing regarding last week’s rash of fires in Prince George.

In a span of 36 hours, a pair of structure fires on Sooke Road, Domano Boulevard along with a commercial blaze to the Northwood Plaza in the Hart, which included Nelly’s Pub and Fort George Baptist Church resulted in a combined 1.7 million dollars in damage.

In an interview with MyPGNow.com, Fire Chief Bryan Burleigh stated while older buildings are more susceptible to balloon framing and multiple renovations where there are inadequate fire stops and void spaces created, that doesn’t seem to be the case right now with the Northwood Plaza and Fort George Church blazes.

“I don’t know if that is the contributing factors in these fires but in general, older buildings have those types of challenges ahead of them.”

Burleigh noted responding to major commercial fires is sad but not uncommon, given what happened last year to a pair of well-known businesses.

“If you look back to 2025 in a period of three weeks, we had the Crossroads incident followed by the First Avenue Bottle Depot (Nechako). There is no rhyme or reason to them in this particular case, we had three in a 24-hour period and that is how accidents happen and sometimes there are contributing factors and other times they are unexplainable.”

“We are running a 24-hour shift pattern now. That is unheard of to have three major structure fires in a single shift. Those guys embraced it and we called staff in and we supported in many ways but it was a phenomenal team effort to manage the heavy workload and demand the community called upon.”

The local fire chief also advised the public to let the fire department’s investigations play out and to avoid spreading false rumours and information on social media platforms.

“What I would like the community to do is allow the process to navigate. Don’t speculate and don’t get caught up in it. Our fire investigation is a systematic approach and very scientific – most often we will find an area of origin and an understanding of what contributed to the loss,” added Burleigh.

He added the Sooke Road investigation is in its final stages while investigators were on scene on Monday at the Domano Boulevard strata complex fire.

Further inspection at Nelly’s started today (Tuesday) while an investigation has yet to begin at the Baptist Church.

“They’ll remove the debris to the area of origin and then they will recreate that scene outside and try to put all the pieces together. They are looking for simple things such as burn patterns and even with the heavy fire load with the damage and debris piled up, there will still beat significant burn patterns, which will indicate areas of origin.” said Burleigh.

“The investigations commence anywhere between 48 and 72 hours after the fire and then based on the insurance, they will send a private investigator.”