From today's Gazette...
Fire in Point surprises no one Recycling warehouse. Borough had ordered firm to empty building of paper
PAUL CHERRY AND LINDA GYULAI, The Gazette
Published: November 16th, 2008
It was an accident waiting to happen.
That is the consensus of many residents in Point St. Charles who watched with dismay yesterday as a derelict building in the former CN rail yards everyone knew was a fire hazard went up in flames.
There were no injuries, the fire department said.
Area residents say the building on Le Ber St. was packed with paper even though the owners, Les Cours Pointe St. Charles, and a company that was using it to store paper were ordered to empty it by the end of October.
"It's a miracle no one's home was destroyed," said a resident who was part of a group that pushed their city borough to have the derelict building emptied. The resident, who spoke on condition that no name be used, alleged that paper was still being trucked to the building until Oct. 20.
Lisa Ferland, who lives in Point St. Charles and is a member of Action Gardien, a coalition of community groups, said paper began being warehoused in the building two years ago.
Action Gardien was particularly opposed to the number of trucks that rumbled through the residential neighbourhood on their way to the former CN yards.
"Questions started being raised regularly by residents. They wanted to know what was going on in these warehouses. They criticized it as not being safe. According to us, it did not seem safe. They were keeping paper in a building with no security measures and it was close to houses." A newsletter issued by the Southwest borough in July, following an inspection by firefighters, stated that the large-scale storage of paper by Montreal-based paper recovery company JC Fibers "conflicted with building usage and conformity bylaw." According to the same newsletter, the building's owners and JC Fibers were summoned "to put an end to these operations. JC Fibers was ordered to empty the building within 90 days, bringing the deadline to the end of October." Reached by phone yesterday, Joe Colubriale, president of JC Fibers, said the company would comment tomorrow. But he did confirm that his firm was renting space in the building.
Vincent Chiara, a Montreal lawyer and real-estate developer who is president of Les Cours Point St. Charles and Groupe Mach, the company planning to redevelop the Canadian National rail yards, could not be reached for comment.
The Southwest borough was on the verge of issuing fines to Chiara, borough mayor Jacqueline Montpetit said.
"Tensions were very high because we wanted him to get the material out," she said.
Montpetit added when the borough learned in September that Chiara had not started to cart away any of the material, it warned him again. Montpetit said she had recently heard that paper was still being delivered to the facility.
"We hadn't set the amount of the fine yet, but it wasn't going to be symbolic," she said.
The building was equipped with sprinklers, Montpetit said, but added she doesn't know whether the water was connected.
The borough will now focus on getting the owner to secure the site and clean it up, she said.
Montpetit said a phone call from the fire department roused her out of bed around 2:15 a.m. She then rushed to the blazing building, she said.
"When they told me where the fire was, I felt horror," she said.
"You can't imagine how attached we were to the building." The facility, which was originally built in 1942, boasted a 15-metre-high windowed ceiling.
The building sits on a sprawling 3.7-million-square-foot lot that used to serve as CN's rail yards.
"Everybody is in agreement that this is a heritage campus," Heritage Montreal program director Dinu Bumbaru said.
The CN shops on the site have been on Heritage Montreal's Top 10 endangered heritage sites since 2006.
The original buildings on the site were constructed in the 1850s to build the rolling stock for the Grand Trunk Railway. Some of the buildings later became maintenance shops.
CN sold the yards in 2006 to Chiara. The site is hemmed in and contaminated but located minutes from downtown.
In June, Chiara told The Gazette he planned to start developing the area in six to 12 months. Plans were in place to divide it into a residential and industrial zone with some community and social housing.
The issue of the building being a possible fire hazard was raised at a city public consultation meeting on Oct. 22 where residents raised questions about whether the building even had access to water.
According to a transcript of the meeting, available on the Office de consultation publique de Montréal's website, Normand Proulx, the borough's director of planning, told concerned residents there was little the borough could do.
Proulx estimated it would take "600 trucks" to remove all the paper from the building and that the borough was still trying to find a short-term solution. He also said JC Fiber was having trouble selling the paper "because the market is down." Firefighters were alerted to the fire at around 2 a.m. yesterday. Division chief Benoît Fleury of the Montreal fire department said it spread fast and was quickly classified as a five-alarm blaze. Fleury said there did appear to be a lot of paper inside the building at the time.
About 125 firefighters were called in to extinguish it, but flames were still visible 18 hours later and a thick column of smoke continued to billow out of the northern end of the building. Ash from the fire could be found on front lawns and cars parked four blocks away.
"Fortunately, it didn't spread to the neighbouring buildings on either side," Fleury said, adding fire officials were unable to determine how the fire started. "The scene has been turned over to the Montreal police." Fleury said it appeared no one was inside the building and none of the homes across the street from it had to be evacuated. He also said it was too early to determine whether the building was completely destroyed, although part of it collapsed.
"It's a loss for the neighbourhood because even though it was just a factory, it was a beautiful piece of architecture. To me it now looks like something from the Blitz in London," said area resident Donovan Reiter, in a reference to the Second World War aerial bombings of London.
[email protected][email protected] © The Gazette (Montreal) 2008 
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