O’LEARY, P.E.I. - Despite losing two cars and a truck plow in a garage fire the night before, Helen Milligan was expressing relief Friday morning.
“It could’ve been worse; it could’ve been a lot worse,” the O’Leary resident said.
Her husband, Omer, had just finished cleaning up his yard from Thursday’s snowfall and had parked his half-ton truck with plow attachment back inside the detached garage.
“He went to step outside and he saw the flames underneath (the truck)” she said.
She said her husband rushed in to call 9-1-1, still intending to try to get the cars out, but couldn’t get back inside.
“It just escalated from there.”
O’Leary fire chief Ron Phillips said flames were shooting out of an open bay door and burning through the other door when firefighters arrived on the scene approximately five minutes after their 10:05 p.m. page.
West Point Fire Department also responded, dealing, at times, with blocked roads and snow up to the grill of their trucks, Phillips reported.
The last of the trucks was on scene until 12:45 a.m. Friday. Phillips said firefighters were able to quickly bring the fire under control but the brisk wind kept reigniting hot spots.
The wind, he said, was blowing the flames away from the Milligans house and down towards the park out back, just brushing past the O’Leary Community Sports Centre next door. A 10-degree counter-clockwise shift in the wind direction, he said, would have pushed the flames towards the arena.
The Milligans have a storage trailer located between their garage and the arena and it, too, escaped damage. The garage, however, was destroyed along with the three vehicles parked inside and a large quantity of tools.
Fire investigator John Chisholm was on scene Friday morning and his findings are similar to what Mr. Milligan observed the night before.
“He’s quite confident it was an accidental fire and that it started with the truck,” said O’Leary fire chief Ron Phillips. What caused the truck to catch fire, though, was undetermined.
