Four vehicles used to transport kids for the daycare inside the Columbus Community Centre were damaged overnight on Monday, March 3, including a bus almost completely disintegrated by fire.
In a statement sent by email, Prince George Fire Rescue Chief Cliff Warner said five firefighters from one fire hall responded to the blaze just before midnight.
“On scene they found a 24-passenger bus on fire,” Warner said. “Crews quickly extinguished the fire, however, there was some heat damage to the building on the adjacent property and a smaller 15-passenger van parked nearby.
“Due to the extent of the fire to the bus, the cause of the fire is deemed undetermined, however suspicious, as there was no obvious reason for the fire to start.”
Around 12:30 a.m. on March 3, Columbus Community Centre facility manager Dawna Varley said she was called by firefighters letting her know that one of the centre’s buses had caught fire in the parking lot.
When she arrived, she told The Citizen, firefighters were using infrared devices to search for remaining hot spots.
The bus was parked on the opposite side of the lot from the front doors, next to the fence separating the lot from an adjacent housing complex.
As things stood later in the morning, after sunrise, the top half of the bus was either completely reduced to ashes except for some thin strips of siding and roofing that wilted under the heat and sagged onto the ground.
All that was left of the passenger seats inside the bus were the metal frames. A 10-passenger van parked next to the burnt bus sustained some minor damage from the plastic housing of a headlight and a rear-view mirror partially melting.
Parts of the fence were blackened by the flames and some of the siding on the house walls facing where the fire took place were visibly warped by the heat.
That bus had been shut down for the winter, Varley said, with its fuel tank empty and its doors chained closed. After previous instances of fuel tanks being punctured, she said the centre has learned to empty them when a vehicle is left unused and the fuel level stays at a quarter-tank or below for those in active use.
Thankfully, she said, the bus was still insured.
Varley said before she went home around 4 a.m., she and RCMP officers who came to the scene went around the building to check for any additional damage but didn’t find any.
Unfortunately, when a driver for the Teeter Tots Early Learning Centre that operates out of the building came in around 7:30 a.m. to get ready to drive kids to school, he discovered damage to two more buses.
One bus, parked up against the side of the building, had its hood pried open somehow. The emergency escape hatch on the top of the bus was open, however Varley said she thought the intruders had gained access through somehow lowering the driver’s side window.
Another bus was locked inside a small fenced compound, but intruders still managed to gain access.
A wooden pallet had been leaned up against a metal storage container. Varley said she thinks the intruders used the pallet to climb on top of the container and down into the area containing the bus, thereby going around the barbed wire that surrounded the rest of the compound.
She showed The Citizen the inside of this bus, which had items tossed around the cabin and the contents of its fuse box torn apart.
“I don’t know what they’re looking for,” Varley said. “They’re obviously looking for something.”
Though she had yet to test whether the two buses that hadn’t burned still worked, Varley said it would make picking up kids for the daycare’s after-school program more difficult if they were out of commission.
However, she said, the kids they look after are not in danger as these events have taken place after hours.
Though the centre has security cameras, Varley said they were taken down late last year to accommodate painting work and were scheduled to go back up on March 4. Even if they had been up, she said people carrying out these acts tend to wear hoodies.
“I’ve been here 23 years and I think I have in the last two years … seven ICBC claims for vandalism up here,” Varley said. “We’ve called the RCMP several times. There’s not much they can do. Everything we own is locked up.”
She added that these events were rare before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Other incidents in recent years include graffiti, fires set on top of the building, the theft of a lawnmower and helium tank from a shed and a 20-foot light standard in the parking lot getting knocked over, Varley said. These have caused the building’s insurance deductible to double from $500 to $1,000.
“I have no idea what the solution is,” she said. “I mean, we can build an eight-foot fence around this place and it wouldn’t help. We’ve got barbed wire on the spots we think they can get up to. We’re in the process right now of building an outdoor ceremony site and I am seriously considering not doing it.”
