Investigators from the White Rock Fire Department were still on the scene Wednesday morning, going through the wreckage of an unoccupied older house that suffered extensive fire damage hours earlier.
At least one uniformed RCMP officer was also present.
Neighbourhood residents told Peace Arch News no one was living in the house, a small wood-frame structure on a heavily wooded lot in the 15200-block of Victoria Avenue.
The home was apparently being used for storage, they said.
Shona McMillan, a visitor from Scotland, was staying at a friend’s house a few doors away when she smelled smoke coming through her window around 1 a.m.
“When I looked out, the moonlight showed that everything was very smoky,” McMillan said.
She ran upstairs, and from the balcony, she could see 20-foot-tall flames erupting from the roof of the weathered blue-green house down the block.
“No one was outside or awake in my house so I ran back in, shouting at people to wake up and as I was calling to my friends, the fire trucks began to go past.”
No injuries were reported.
By the time the fire was extinguished, it had burned through the back half of the house, knocking holes in the charred roof.
At PAN press time, the cause of the blaze had not been determined.