A fire at the courthouse was put out by two passers-by yesterday.
Jayme Marsolais and Jaret Knudson were driving up Queensway when they noticed smoke coming from outside the front of the Courthouse.
“We were just turning off onto Queensway, and [Knudson] said “oh, there’s a fire at the courthouse!” Marsolais recalled. “I asked if he had a fire extinguisher or a shovel in the truck. ‘Maybe we’ll just go put it out real quick.'”
There was no extinguisher in the truck, so the pair ran to Cobra Auto Styling, a detailing company across the street, and asked for theirs.
“They said ‘yeah, sure, go for it!’ So we ran over and put it out as best we could until the fire trucks showed up,” Marsolais said. “It must have just happened because it wasn’t too bad. Basically by the time we started running to the fire is when it started getting pretty tall.”
“We just kind of put it out,” Knudson said. “There was a bunch of people not doing – you need more doers and not not-doers. We just got it under control, you know how it goes.”
The fire was in the shrubs outside of the courthouse, Marsolais said they never figured out what the official cause of the fire was, but Knudson figured it was a cigarette butt.
“Not sure, but the flames were going pretty good by the time we got there,” Knudson said, adding there was around six inches of dry material up against the building that was catching fast.
“Everybody was kind of caught off guard,” he continued, laughing. “Even the fire guys said ‘who are you guys?’ We were like ‘oh, we just put the fire out, but you guys got it from here! Have a great day!’ then we jumped in my truck and took off.”
Cobra Auto Styling posted the video of Marsolais and Knudson running across the street and putting the fire out, you can see that here.
The video has been viewed nearly 10,000 times in under a day.
“We had a bunch of friends start sharing it, and we were like ‘well, we are Prince George famous!'” Marsolais said with a laugh.
He thanked the fast acting staff at Cobra, saying “we just kind of ran in there and asked to borrow their fire extinguisher. It is good to know there are people that are out there who are like ‘yeah, no problem, take what you need, go give ‘er.”
“I came home and didn’t even tell the story to the missus, it was just like another day, I kind of forgot it even happened, you know, just something we did,” Knudson said. “All of a sudden Facebook is blowing up and everyone is texting me ‘holy, what were you up to today!'”
“I didn’t even realize they had cameras,” he laughed. “It blows up quick when they find out who you are and what you’ve done, just goes to show you are always being watched – good or bad.”