There was a certain grim inevitability to the fire on Smith St. Thursday evening.
Something bad was going to happen at that location, it was only a matter of time before we found out what it would wind up being. This time, it was a fire, but it could have been a collapse, it could have been someone injuring themselves trying to access the building, it could have been all manner of things. Buildings don’t respond well to neglect, and that building has been neglected for years. It was only a matter of time before something happened to it.
This fire, along with the fire on Front St. in 2015 that caused the destruction of a former curling rink, should cause the city to look hard at what, exactly, it can do to deal with the neglected buildings in town. There are bylaws in place that are in the interest of public safety, and even if nobody is actually occupying these old buildings, in many cases they are a public danger. The smoke, for instance, could easily have caused injury or death, given how thick it was and how much was coming out of the building.
The problem is naturally going to be how much power the city actually has when it comes to bylaw enforcement, and what it can do when faced with property owners who just leave a building sit and become a hazard. The fines should be high enough that it becomes prohibitively expensive to leave a neglected building sit, pushing people to do something. In some cases, that means knocking it down and having an empty lot – which might be painful in some cases, especially buildings that had some historic significance. In other cases, it means selling the building to someone who will actually do something with it. Let’s give some credit to TA Foods, for example, who took over the Western Grocers location on Broadway and made it into something again. More things like that are great news for the city, since that building could have easily become yet another eyesore without the new owner. Business owners stepping up, buying out older properties, and improving them should be encouraged.
What’s clear is that we don’t want another fire like the one on Thursday, and whatever the official cause winds up being, the fire was effectively caused by neglect. That building was neglected for years, much to the frustration of surrounding property owners, and that neglect meant something bad was going to happen eventually. It’s not the only neglected building in town, and the question now becomes what we can do in order to avoid another fire.
