Fortunately no one was hurt. Sounds like someone forgot to shut their Bar-B-Q off.
Railton
http://www.citynews.ca/2016/09/14/million-dollar-oakville-home-damaged-in-fire/
That is a weirdly written article:
“'A neighbour who saw the fire knocked on the door and got them out of the house,' Lieferink said"
He knocked??
"The roof of the home collapsed, causing a million dollars in damage." Says who? Despite real estate values in Oakville, seems unlikely the house pictured would cost $1M to repair....
I've done many fire repair jobs on houses (measuring to replace trusses). In 95% of all the cases I've seen, the entire house gets gutted down to the studs, even if the fire was very localized (say the kitchen). Smoke and water damage play hell on a house. In most cases, the fire has gotten into the roof cavity, which means a portion of or the entire roof structure needs replacing. Most of the jobs I've seen, the structure below the roof is okay, meaning floors, foundation, etc. Portions of walls sometimes need to be replaced. Windows often need to be replaced as they've either been broken by heat or by firefighters. There is a TON of labour involved with cleaning any smoke damaged structure like wall studs and trusses/joists that aren't being replaced. The affected areas all have to be extensively cleaned and then sealed. Because of the amount of work and materials required in gutting and refinishing an entire house, the costs associated even with a small fire are quite high.
On THIS house in particular, you can see evidence of smoke leaking through the garage doors. This tells me the fire probably started on the Main level, then spread to the 2nd floor, and subsequently to the roof cavity. There is probably severe structural damage to the 2nd floor, and the roof will obviously need to be completely replaced. The one thing I'm not sure of, is how the value of damage is estimated. Do they take the percentage of the house damaged and multiply it by the assessed value? If this is the case, I could see a $1.5mil house having $1mil of damage. IF however, they assess damage by how much will be required to fix it, i.e. labour and materials, then I can't see it being more than a few hundred thousand, for a house of this size.
My guess is they take a percentage of the assessed value of the house. It will cost significantly less than that to repair the house, even with high end finishes, which is why the insurance company will choose to repair what is left, rather than razing to foundation and starting over.
