Ainee's Convenience Store fire

The Citizen reported on a fire this morning at a convenience store on Bronson, just South of the Queensway. Luckily, nobody was injured. While technically outside Centretown, I decided to check out the site this afternoon, just South of Drummond's Gas.

I approached via Renfrew, but there were emergency vehicles at the end of that street, so I went around by Imperial, to approach via the gas station. Interestingly some bits of burth stuff had accumulated along the curb as far away as the fork of Imperial and Chamberlain.

Coming down Bronson, one lane was blocked off with a tightly-packed perimeter of barricades. Traffic was flowing, but the bottleneck kept a steady northbound stream of traffic.

The Citizen photo doesn't do justice to the amount of damage in the fire (of course, they can only show so much with a single photo). While their photo helps you see what the building used to be, it doesn't quite convey that the roof of the building toppled down and you can now see through the building:

A front angle:

Another thing you don't see in the Citizen's photo is the second building at the back which also had its roof come down:

Here's a shot of all the debris on the sidewalk in front of the place:

And a wider shot for more Northbound context. It was difficult to get a clear shot, with the constant traffic squeezing through the single northbound lane:

The Citizen story says that an explosion triggered the fire. I'm not sure if that's related to why there were DVD cases across the street:

One other thing I remarked is the "Tim Horton's Opening Soon" sign in the window of the gas station next door. That'll give some relief to the people waiting at the bus stop:

It's always terrible to see buildings burn down. Let's hope something useful gets built there at the scale of the neighbourhood, and not another parking lot.

Incidentally, for those of you who can't believe the retro-style price of gas displayed above, maybe this will make it seem more believable: