An abandoned driving range in North Burnaby is not much more than a pile of rubble following a fire that investigators are treating as suspicious.
Fire crews were called out to the former Hastings Golf Centre driving range at the corner of Hastings Street and Kensington Avenue, around 4 a.m. for a report of a fire.
By the time the fire department arrived, smoke and flames were already burning a couple of the structures on the property.
Burnaby fire Capt. Dean Thomas said a second alarm was called, and crews went into a defensive mode to keep the fire from spreading to the Shell oil refinery down the street.
However, he noted, the refinery and nearby structures were not in any danger.
“We wouldn’t really have cared about the structure burning because it was a lost cause, they just wanted to keep it from extending to anything else,” Thomas said.
By Monday afternoon, crews were still on site cleaning up.
The blaze is considered suspicious since the building was vacant, with both the fire department and Burnaby RCMP investigating.
“It’s going to be a very difficult building to investigate because it’s very dangerous, it could collapse at any time,” Thomas said.
While no one was injured and no one was found inside at the time of the fire, there is evidence that squatters had been using some of the vacant buildings on the property at some point.
A second, smaller building, the size of a house, also sits on the property and was covered in graffiti and garbage, but it didn’t appear to be damaged from the fire.
While Thomas said he wasn’t sure if anyone was in any of the buildings prior to the fire, he said the driving range had been the site of a previous fire caused by squatters.
Just down the street at Saveco Sports, owner Vince Fazio said there are a few homeless people who frequent the area.
He said the driving range property has been empty for at least five years and has been a point of speculation for some sort of redevelopment, like a hotel.
“People don’t even know anything is there,” he told theNOW.
He said he’d like to see something done with property.
According to the city, the owners of the driving range, who are listed as a numbered company out of Vancouver, cancelled the business licence in the fall of 2011, while a restaurant on the property was operated for a short time after.
Since 2012, the city received three complaints about the property for being unsightly, with the last coming from 2014. No fines were ever issued.
Clayton Hall, Burnaby’s manager of licensing and regulatory bylaws, said he’s not sure what will happen to the property now, but he expects the city to work with the owner to make sure while vacant, it remains secure and clean.
“Eventually, if the property remains unsightly, once again we’ll reach out to the property owner and try and figure out the intentions are of the property,” he said.
