Fire in roof at Moncton City Hall

It’s business as usual this morning at Moncton City Hall, even after a fire in the roof.

Moncton Fire Platoon Chief Brian Macdonald says it was all hands on deck when they got the call at around 9:30 pm Thursday night.

Upon arrival they found flames coming from the roof, “They were doing some kind of renovations on the roof of city hall and it looks like a fire started somewhere in that area. The roof area that was burning was metal and plywood, so it was very difficult to dig out the fire. It required a lot of personnel using metal cutting saws on the roof to expose the fire,” Macdonald says.

There was concern at one point that the fire may have spread to the inside of the building, and Macdonald called for a 30-foot ladder to reach the high ceiling.

“Directly below the fire was an atrium on the top floor of city hall.  This atrium has a very high ceiling. We were trying to open up that area to see if the fire had spread.  It turns out we did not need that extension ladder inside the city hall building. We managed to put the fire out from the outside,” Macdonald told our newsroom.

It wasn’t an easy job though and involved a lot of cutting, “A lot of saws, a lot of firefighters cutting, to open up the area.”

Macdonald says there is damage to the roof and some water damage to the top floor of City Hall.

Only one person, a cleaner was inside the building when the fire broke out, but Macdonald says they evacuated safely.

Moncton’s Main Street was closed for several hours while emergency responders were on the scene.

All five Moncton fire stations responded to the scene to help battle the blaze along with RCMP, Ambulance NB, NB Power and City officials.

“Fires in roofs of buildings are not all that uncommon. It does happen, but they generally require a lot of labour-intensive work to open up the roof. Naturally, a roof was made to keep water out.  We’re trying to put water in to put the fire out so that can prove to be challenging. That was the case last night, so it took a couple of hours and a lot of firefighters doing a lot of hard work to cut through the steel to open up the roof and put the fire out,” Macdonald says.

Fire investigators are on the scene today trying to pinpoint the cause.

City Spokesperson Isabelle Leblanc says Moncton City Hall is open today.