An early afternoon fire in a building along Macleod Trail damaged a number of businesses but there were no serious injuries thanks, in part, to the efforts of a Dream Centre staff member and a client.
Shortly after 12:30 p.m., Mackie Martineau, who works at the Calgary Dream Centre, noticed a building burning across Macleod Trail so he grabbed a fire extinguisher and sprinted across the road.
"By then, the fire was already pretty much going pretty good," said Marineau. "(I) wasted the fire extinguisher, saw that that wasn’t going to work, so I started ripping doors open and telling people to get the hell out.”
Martineau and a woman who had been in a second floor business found themselves trapped by the flames. "I got her to jump over the railing," said Martineau. "Some people came underneath us and I helped her drop down and then I dropped down myself.”
One of Martineau's clients, Kaden Clouston, noticed the commotion and began yelling into the businesses in the Urban Square building.
“A gentleman was in the middle of getting a tattoo and I yelled out ‘guys, we’ve got to get out of the building, there’s a fire’,” recalled Clouston. “They were like ‘okay, calm down, we’ll do this calmly’ and I’m like ‘No, you guys don’t realize the entire building is on fire’.”
“By the time we got to the initial place where I’d gone in, the flames were already three times as big. We were trying to figure how to go through and we just had to go through all the smoke.”
Within minutes, a large Calgary Fire Department presence arrived at quickly doused the flames.
CFD District Chief Wayne McQueen says Martineau and Clouston are heroes. "It was a great job and they saved some lives."
Martineau says he considered the fire to be 'an obstacle not a threat' and he's glad everyone made it out okay. He was hesitiant to accept accolades. “I’ve devoted my life to helping other people, so when I saw those flames, I just did what anybody should do.”
Clouston says the incident will stay with him for the rest of his life. “That’s what humanity is. We help each other out in any way we can.”
McQueen says nine people were assessed at the scene by EMS as a precautionary measure but no serious injuries have been reported..
An investigation into the fire is underway but McQueen says it appears the fire made its way through the roof. “It looks like it got into the eaves and that’s mostly where the fire was.”
All lanes of Macleod Trail were temporarily closed between 42 Avenue and 46 Avenue S.W. during the CFD response and intital investigation.
