Fire strikes Bank Street building again

Dozens of firefighters converged at a downtown Ottawa commercial building for the second time in 17 days on Wednesday.

The call to 275 Bank Street, at Somerset Street, came just after 5:30 a.m., drawing 18 fire trucks and 50 firefighters. District fire Chief Neil Warren said there was heavy smoke on the fourth floor of the four-storey building when firefighters arrived, resulting in almost zero visibility.

"They had to go through quite a maze of hallways to get to the office that was actually burning," he said.

The fire was contained in that office and extinguished.

Firefighters also searched the building for other fires, since the previous fire in the building on Sept. 15 started on both the second and fourth floors. The earlier fire caused more than $1.2 million in damage and was determined by police to be arson.

Warren said that when the second fire broke out, many windows were still boarded up from the first fire.

"And I'm not even sure how far that cleanup had progressed," he said.

That does raise suspicions about Wednesday's fire, he added. 

"It will be looked at closely."

Luigi Caparelli, a spokesman for Primecorp Commercial Realty, which owns the building, said the office damaged in Wednesday's fire was used by the Canadian Co-operative Association, and its timing is suspicious.

"This is the second time … in two weeks so either somebody's targeting or — I can't speculate. I don't know."

The building has a number of street level stores and restaurants and a variety of offices on the floors above, including the Bangladesh High Commission and the U.S. Defence Contract Management Agency.

The RCMP had been in the building guarding the Bangladesh High Commission while the commission's alarm was fixed after the first fire, but had recently left once the repairs were complete.

The intersection of Bank and Somerset was closed Wednesday morning as a result of the fire, and traffic was also barred from heading toward the area from surrounding intersections.