Vancouver's fire chief has ordered two dozen tenants out of an east-side apartment complex that's being described as the most dangerous building in the city.
The 18-unit building at 2154 Dundas Street was evacuated Thursday night, after fire inspectors ruled it too dangerous to live in because it has no working fire alarms or fire walls and a faulty electrical panel.
"This building is sick. It's imminently dangerous to the tenants who are here," Vancouver Fire Chief John McKearney said.
"This was a fire waiting to happen."
A notice on the main entrance to the building says it is owned by Joshua Iu of Yiu Enterprises.
CTV News tried to reach him, but there was no answer at his Burnaby home.
"I know he has not been cooperative and that he has not been adhering to the orders that he's been given," McKearney said.
Doreen Luce has lived in the building for two years, and was only allowed back into her suite to grab a few things on Friday.
"They said the building was unsafe. That's all I know. So we had to take our stuff, what little we had because we can only carry so much, and they set us up in a room," she said.
If the building isn't brought up to code quickly, the city has promised tenants a new place to live.
Evacuating a building before a fire is highly unusual. In December, three men died at a rooming house on Pandora Street -- another property with numerous failed inspections.
The city has been criticized for not shutting it down before tragedy struck.
"We were not going to wait until another senseless death," McKearney said. "Pandora had all of us going, look, could we have done more?"
This year the fire department plans to inspect 20,000 buildings, up from 13,000 in 2010.
"This is a business transformation. We're deploying our firefighters to do things that they're trained to do, but we're doing it in a different way," Vancouver City Manager Penny Ballem said.
With a report from CTV British Columbia's Shannon Paterson
