Dozens of people are homeless after a huge wind-whipped fire tore through a condominium complex and left a south Edmonton street in charred ruins on Saturday.
No one was hurt, but the massive fire destroyed the still-under construction 149-unit condo building.
Nine neighbouring two-family homes were also destroyed, and a fire department official said 38 other two-family homes were damaged in some way.
Damage was expected to be in the millions of dollars.
Black smoke could be seen for kilometres and the roar of a fire woke up residents as the blaze took hold shortly after 5 a.m.
"I noticed when I was closing my window that it wasn't the guys working on the construction, it was crackling of the fire," Bryan Peters, whose home was destroyed, told CTV Edmonton.
With the blaze under control, the enormity of the blaze was obvious. All that was left standing of the four-storey building was an elevator shaft.
"I just didn't realize the total devastation and it's not just us," said Blain Davis, who were out of town when they got a phone call that their house had burned to the ground.
"There is probably 30 other families that are in the same boat as us."
Fire officials have not yet determined how the three-alarm fire started, but said they believe the blaze began in the condo building.
"In talking to fire captains that have been on the job almost 30 years, they say this is the biggest residential fire that they've had to battle that they can remember," Edmonton Fire Spokesperson Nikki Booth told CTV Newsnet.
The fire, which struck in the MacEwan neighbourhood, was fanned by strong winds gusting up to 25 kilometres per hour.
One crew member was taken to hospital to be treated for exhaustion while another veteran firefighter described the neighbourhood as looking like a "war zone."
Municipal affairs and housing minister Ray Danyluk vows there will be help for fire victims.
"Anything that we need to do we will do," he said.
Edmonton's mayor visited the site to see the damage for himself.
"Far greater devastation than I thought it was going to be but what is far more important is no one was hurt which is really the most important issue," said Stephen Mandel.
Booth suggested damage might have been minimized if different building codes were implemented to increase the distance between houses and mandate the kind of siding used.
"We're grateful that no one was injured ... however, we have devastated a community emotionally," Booth said.
"A fire of this size and this magnitude definitely creates tremendous trauma to the community and we'd like to see that those code changes come into place."
With a report from CTV Edmonton's Courtney Mosentine and files from The Canadian Press
