Quesnel, B.C. – The fallout from Wednesday’s night’s explosion and fire at the WestPine MDF plant in Quesnel could have been a lot worse if not for the quick response of the city’s first responders.

Mayor Bob Simpson says fire crews were on site immediately and responded in full force as they are a trained industrial fire department.

“They train for these circumstances so it was really proof that they’re training paid off and they were able to get on top of that fire,” he says. “They knew what they were doing and they were able to deal with it in an appropriate manner. I think that’s the critical piece.”

Quesnel Mayor Bob Simpson

Though the explosion occurred at 5:30 p.m., Simpson says he wasn’t aware of what had happened until he finished up a meeting regarding the city’s soon to be new arena at the curling rink at about a quarter to 7:00 p.m.

“When I came out of the curling rink and picked up my pone there were a number of messages including one from the fire chief so I was oblivious to it going on,” he says.

“By the time I got up to the site the main fire had been knocked down and they were doing the spot fire work inside the building so it really couldn’t have gone better from that perspective after the initial event.”

In fact Simpson says everything went “lock-step” according to how it should have.

“From evacuation to the head count to the fire on site and then getting that fire knocked down and under control very quickly.”

Perhaps what makes the response even more impressive is that it was the first of its kind in Quesnel.

 “We had a gas explosion on the west side related to our West Quesnel land stability but that was in a residential area and it was dealt with appropriately. But we’ve had nothing in our industrial area of this kind.”