Explosion at Vaughan cafe causes partial building collapse

globalnews.ca
By David Shum
June 29, 2017

Police are investigating the cause of a “suspicious” explosion that destroyed a cafe in Vaughan, Ont., early Thursday morning.

Emergency crews responded to the scene around 5:30 a.m. at 120 Winges Road near Highway 7 and Weston Road and located a commercial plaza unit with its exterior cinder block wall blown out.

“We received two calls at our 911 centre. The first was a car into this building and the second was an oven fire,” Deputy Fire Chief Deryn Rizzi said.

“Unrelated, York Regional Police was in the area addressing a different issue when they came across this.”

Vaughan Fire Services said they did make entry into Cafe Corretto but were not able to complete a primary search of the building.

“We would deem this as structurally unstable. You see there are some walls down. The roof is unstable,” Rizzi said.

“We’ve called in our building standards department. So they will put an order on the building to ensure that nobody goes in and also an engineer would also come out.”

Images from the Global News chopper shows a black vehicle covered in debris.

York Regional Police said a 33-year-old man was taken to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. He has since been placed under arrest and authorities are treating the incident as suspicious.

It’s unclear at this point if the person was the driver of the vehicle, a cafe employee or a bystander.

There’s no official word yet on the cause of the explosion and the Office of the Ontario Fire Marshall has been notified.

“It would be very difficult to do a primary search of the entire area because there’s a lot of debris. So we haven’t been able to get an ‘all clear’ for the building,” Rizzi said.

Cafe Corretto was one of 11 locations targeted by police last year in an illegal video game machine investigation.

Police seized 74 illegal gaming machines and approximately $200,000 in cash after executing search warrants in Toronto and York Region.

Anyone with information is asked to contact the #4 District Criminal Investigations Bureau at 1-866-876-5423, ext.7441 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS.