Police investigate after two people found dead in burned Springhill, N.S., home

Mar 21, 2018 | 4:00 AM

SPRINGHILL, N.S. — Two bodies were recovered from a rural home in northern Nova Scotia after a fire broke out in the basement Tuesday afternoon, the local fire chief says.

Firefighters were dispatched to Beaton’s Lane on the western outskirts of Springhill just before 4:30 p.m.

No details were released about the victims or what caused the fire, but the RCMP described the fire as suspicious.

Springhill fire Chief Stanley Hunter said it appears the home was recently purchased and was under renovation.

He said more than two dozen firefighters from Springhill were called to the scene, but none of them knew who owned the small home.

“Usually, someone knows,” he said, adding that firefighters from Oxford and Southampton were also sent to the scene.

The fire damaged the inside of the home, but the flames were extinguished quickly and the outside of the house was left relatively untouched, Hunter said.

With little official information available, local residents were swapping rumours about what happened, he said.

“Rumours spread like wildfire,” said Hunter, a local firefighter for 40 years. “We get questions, but our members are taught not to say anything … People end up speculating.”

Hunter confirmed that a stress management team was expected to debrief his crew Thursday.

“Whenever there’s a death, it usually does have a negative impact on our members.”

RCMP spokesman Cpl. Dal Hutchinson said autopsies were expected to be performed Wednesday to determine the cause of death.

“The investigation is in the early stages right now,” Hutchinson said in an interview.

“The autopsies should confirm not only gender and age, but identification of the two individuals as well … It could take a couple days before things are confirmed — or even longer.”

Nova Scotia’s Office of the Fire Marshal and the Medical Examiner’s Service have been called in, but the scene remained under the control of the RCMP’s major crime unit by late Wednesday afternoon.

“We have not determined the nature of (the fire),” Hunter said. “We put the fire out and the RCMP are in charge of it now.”

Surrounded by woods, the two-storey home is near the end of a short, dead-end lane with less than 10 other neighbouring homes.

Springhill is a two-hour drive north of Halifax.

The Canadian Press

Note to readers: This is a corrected story. An earlier story gave the wrong last name for the fire chief