32 families still displaced after Hampstead fire

Anca Alaman was about to put her daughter to sleep when she heard firefighter sirens blaring outside her home on New Year's Eve.

After grabbing her child, she and her husband, Mircei Alaman, rushed to join their neighbours on the sidewalk as smoke spread throughout their building on Côte-Saint-Luc Road.

A three-alarm fire engulfed an apartment on the ground floor on Dec. 31, killing a five-year-old boy and displacing 32 families. The boy's father remains in critical condition.

"It's overwhelming. It's hard," Alaman said.

In just two days, neighbours raised $20,000 for the child's mother to help pay for funeral expenses.

"They are going to need a lot of financial help to go through this terrible tragedy," said Louise Raymond, the administrator of Placements Mayne, which owns the building.

Police say they believe the cause of the fire was accidental and are investigating whether smoke detectors were working.

Building closed for investigation

While investigators look into what caused the blaze, they aren't allowing residents to enter their homes.

Only the apartment where the fire started is a total loss, but smoke reached the fourth floor, Raymond said.

"People don't realize the danger of smoke," she said. "They think they can go through it and breathe, but it's impossible."

Still stuck in Anca Alaman's first-floor apartment is equipment that helps her four-year-old child with disabilities survive.

After the fire was extinguished, her husband was given all of three minutes to take a handful of clothes and diapers before a firefighter escorted him out of their home, she said.

Their daughter has a rare, neurological disorder, Rett syndrome, which slows her ability to walk and limits her mobility.

"He could have taken more if we had more time," Alaman said.

The three-alarm fire happened at an apartment building on Chemin de la Côte-Saint-Luc in Hampstead, Que., an on-island suburb of the city of Montreal. (Stéphane Grégoire/Radio-Canada)

Cleanup of the building is underway, but it will be a "long process" that could take months, Raymond said.

Most of the residents have been able to move in with family and friends. For now, the Alaman family is staying at a hotel thanks to the Red Cross. The family's insurance was able to find them temporary housing, but it will only cover two months.

"We are lucky because we are safe, because we know that other families have lost their child," Anca Alaman said. "We already found good people that helped us in the first few days, and we hope to find more."