Watchdog Tapster crawls through a hole punched through a door by London firefighters to escape the smoke-filled interior of A 1 Recycling. The German shepherd, along with a Dalmatian, Tasha, escaped uninjured from the blazing building. (Source: Ken Wightman/The London Free Press)
Fire hits recycling plant
Children were seen running from a vacant lot next door.
By Pat Currie
The London Free Press
Children playing in a loner’s tiny shanty were blamed Thursday for a fire that gutted a paper-recycling building on Bathurst Street between William and Adelaide streets.
“There’s no insurance, nothing,” said Doris McAndrew, who founded A 1 Recycling 15 years ago with her husband. She estimated the loss at $500,000.
A London fire department spokesman said the fire broke out at the 564 Bathurst St. scene after smoke was seen pouring from one of two connected A 1 Recycling buildings at 7:31 p.m. On a hot June evening, they battled the inferno — in the paper-stuffed buildings for an hour before bringing it under control, then faced a night of shifting and wetting down tonnes of paper in the smoking ruins.
“This was vandalism, not arson,” Platoon Chief Peter Harding said.
Shortly before flames erupted from the steel-sheathed building, children were seen running from a vacant lot next door where a shanty — known only as the Camper — went up in an awesome plume of smoke against the northwest corner of the recycling plant next to the CNR tracks, Harding said.
Flames from the burning Camper ignited and then whooshed into the recycling plant, and in through its windows, then roared through the masses of paper stored inside, Harding said.
In the heat of the battle, spectators cheered as firefighters bashed in a door and pulled out watchdogs: Tasha, a Dalmatian, and Tapster, a German shepherd.
“There was a cat in there, too. I tried to bring it back, but it didn’t make it,” said sweat-soaked and smoke-smeared firefighter John Mollica as he sat on the curb of a pumper and gulped bottled water.
Moments later, Wolf arrived aboard a bicycle and lashed an array of articles, including a cage with a black rabbit inside. Items clattered to the street as he tried to grab fire hoses and made straight for his camper home.
“That’s my property. That’s my stuff in there,” he yelled at firefighters and spectators alike who shooed him away from the blackened, smoking shell.
