Residents displaced after west Winnipeg apartment fire
CTV
Residents of an apartment building at the west edge of Winnipeg are temporarily homeless after a fire early Sunday morning.
It was a startling wake-up call for people living in an apartment building on Winnipeg's west edge.
“Some girl just running around going ‘fire, fire!’ It doesn’t sound real. You don’t think anything of it. And all of a sudden, I go outside and I hear crackling,” resident Clarissa Friesen told CTV News.
The Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service (WFPS) said it got the call just before 5 a.m. when crews responded to a three-storey apartment building in the 500 block of Gagnon Street – just off Portage Avenue near the Perimeter Highway.
“The whole balcony was just engulfed in flames, so I ran back inside and got my boyfriend and said we got to get out now,” Friesen said.
Firefighters saw smoke and flames coming from the building and attacked the fire from the outside while ensuring residents were safely evacuating.
Maddison Buckle said she woke up to firefighters breaking down her door.
"I didn’t have time to grab my cats. I had to leave them. I had to leave with just my dog, my keys and my phone,” Buckle told CTV News.
