

Chris Fox, CP24.com





An investigation is underway after a fire broke out in inside a vacant St. James Town highrise that has set empty ever since a massive electrical fire displaced its 1,500 residents last summer.

Contractors who were inside 650 Parliament Street first reported the fire at around 7:55 a.m. after observing heavy smoke.

Chief Matthew Pegg tells CP24 that crews arrived on scene within about three minutes and were able to quickly access the fire inside a unit on the 15th floor. He said that the fire was then fully extinguished within about 20 minutes.

No injuries were reported.

“We have now dispatched and deployed our fire investigations team so they will begin the process of finding out exactly what happened today,” Pegg said. “Certainly there are workers in the building – there has been a considerable amount of work happening inside since the major six-alarm fire – but there is no residents inside the building. I won’t speculate (on the cause). I will let our investigators go in and do the origin, cause and circumstance investigation and figure out what happened.”

According to Platoon Chief Kevin Shaw, the unit which the fire was confined to sustained “heavy damage.”

“There was a lot of fire load in that unit, it actually burnt the door,” he said.

Residents of 650 Parliament Street were initially told that they would be able to move back into their units in early 2019, however the timeline for the return of residents has since been pushed back multiple times.

In the most recent update in March, the building management company told residents that they wouldn’t be able to return until the fall at the earliest.

An estimated $20 million in work had taken place on the building by March with another $26 million in work planned.