Nanaimo:
Palms Harbourside Marina
Moby
Dick Lounge and Marina
Oct. 22 2009
 At least six boats have been destroyed in a fire at Palms Harbourside Marina in Nanaimo following an explosion shortly after 1 p.m. Wednesday. Photograph by: Krista Charke, Nanaimo Daily News _______ A spectacular explosion and fire that ripped through a Nanaimo, B.C., marina could have been much worse, the marina's owner said Wednesday. One boat was sunk and six others damaged in the blaze that started after an explosion inside a boat shed, said John Nguyen, who operates the Palms Harbourside Marina in the Vancouver Island city. "We're not sure exactly what happened but something blew up in one of the boat sheds and caught on fire, and four boat sheds is burnt," he said. Gayle Rettmer was on her boat with her husband when the explosion took place. "We were just getting ready to leave and (there was) a huge explosion at the end of the slip where our boat is tied, at the end of the boat sheds, and everything just shook," she said. "The boat sheds almost, like, lifted up and everything just shook. It was a deafening, deafening sound." RCMP spokesman Const. Gary O'Brien said he's never seen damage of this magnitude from a boat fire. "This was like a nuclear explosion went off," he said. It's the third marina fire on the West Coast this month. Three boats were damaged by a fire in Sidney, north of Victoria, about two weeks ago, and last week four vessels were damaged or destroyed by fire at a Coal Harbour marina in downtown Vancouver. Nguyen said no one was injured in the latest fire and he's thanking the marina's standpipe system, required by current fire regulations, for saving most of the facility and its 100 boats. "We're lucky that we have this state-of-the-art fire-fighting system on the dock, so the fire department responds really quick and they just connected to that system and put out the fire," he said. "We would have lost half the marina." O'Brien said the cause of the explosion was still unknown and investigators are not making any connection to the other recent marina fires. "It's so early in the investigation at this point. If there's any link they'll look at those," he said. ____  Firefighters battle a fire at a Nanaimo marina Wednesday after an explosion at about1 p.m. At least six boats were destroyed in the fire. Photograph by: Krista Bryce, Nanaimo Daily News Copyright © 2009 The Canadian Press |