Investigators may still be clawing through the rubble Thursday to determine what caused the main market building at the St. Jacobs Farmers Market to catch fire Monday – but if they are, they’ll be sharing space with vendors and customers.
Market owner Marcus Shantz says the market will be open for its normal Thursday morning session, with as many vendors on-site as possible.
“We’re going to have the whole outdoor market open on Thursday, and also the Peddler’s Village section,” he tells CTV News.
“There’s a chance we can get some of the vendors who were in the building that burnt down in place by Thursday, but I can’t promise that all of them will be ready.”
Meanwhile, following a second day of investigation, fire officials say they’re making progress in learning what caused the fire.
“The investigation has led us to the southeast corner of the building. We’re doing an excavation in there, examining all the fire patterns,” Lonnie Schubert of the Office of the Fire Marshal told reporters Tuesday morning.
“We’ll concentrate on that until we can come up with an idea of how this thing occurred.”
Criminal activity has been ruled out as the cause of the fire, which broke out in the building shortly before 2 a.m. Monday and completely demolished the completely wooden structure a few hours later.
Schubert said clues from surveillance video were instrumental in narrowing the focus of the investigation to the southeast corner, where a number of restaurants and food stands – including Conestoga Fries and the Stone Crock Bakery – were housed.
Rob Brady of Brady’s Meats, one of the 60 vendors in the building, says his thoughts are with his fellow vendors, many of whom suffered worse losses than he did.
“We were quite fortunate, we didn’t lose a lot of product,” he says.
“A lot of the vendors upstairs were probably in a worse situation, so that’s who I’m feeling for right now.”
Shantz says the market building will be rebuilt in a permanent fashion, although the exact details of that still have to be ironed out.
“At the moment, we’re thinking of tent-raising – a temporary place to get our vendors started in an interim way, and that’ll give us time to make plans for rebuilding the building in a permanent way,” he says.
“It’s not a simple matter of popping it up in a couple of months. We want to do it right, so we want to take some time to plan for that.”
Thunderstorms were present in the north Waterloo area late Sunday night and early Monday morning, but investigators say they don’t believe a lightning strike sparked the fire.
“With the video and what we’ve seen, it’s unlikely that it was lightning,” said Schubert.
The investigation is now focused on examining the remnants of electrical appliances in the southeast corner.
Five investigators started working at the scene around 5 a.m. Tuesday, combing through the rubble by hand. Forensic engineers may also be brought in.
“We have to look at all those things, everything that’s a potential ignition sources, until we can eliminate them,” says Schubert.
“Will we be done today? Not likely.”
While the investigators combed through what remained of the main building, business carried on more or less as usual down the street at the Ontario Livestock Exchange, one of the largest livestock exchanges in the province – although they were a little less busy than on a normal Tuesday.
“I can understand why we’re lighter today,” says livestock exchange president Larry Witzel.
“We had hundreds of calls yesterday from our customers. A lot of them were very thankful that we were still able to operate today.”
Organizers of the Cambridge Fall Fair, which runs from Thursday to Sunday at Dickson Park, have offered the last few available spots at their event to affected dry goods vendors from St. Jacobs for free.
“We want to get them back on their feet. For some of these people, it was their livelihood and (now) they’ve got nothing,” says market co-ordinator Colleen Franklin-Hanley.
There was no sprinkler system present in the 24,000-square-foot market building, but neither Shantz nor several vendors say insurance companies ever raised it as an issue.
Under the building code at the time of construction, sprinklers were not mandatory for a building of that size and type.
Woolwich Township firefighters say they inspected the building every six months.
