A treasured photo album has been recovered from a building badly damaged by fire in Sackville, N.B.
The building was home to the Daybreak Centre, a non-profit mental health support group, and the album was created by a group member who recently passed away.
The Daybreak Centre offers mental health services to adults in the area, but members say it’s more like a family than a support group.
Clients say they are devastated after fire ripped through the building Monday evening.
“I heard about it, I kind of didn’t believe it. I thought it was the building back there, so I came for a drive here and saw all the flames high up and tears a little bit, a little bit of anxiety coming in,” said Noah Troop, a client of the Daybreak Centre.
Officials are still investigating the cause.
“Undetermined at this point, but there is a significant amount of water and fire damage to the building,’ said Sackville Fire Chief Craig Bowser.
While Daybreak clients are mourning the loss of the centre, an amazing discovery Wednesday morning has given the group hope for the future.
“We’d had a member last year who passed away and one of the things she’d done in her last months with us was to create a scrapbook and a journal of all the kinds of activities that we do,” said executive director Melody Petlock.
The woman’s husband brought the album back to Daybreak after she passed away.
“Somebody said ‘oh, this is where our room was,’ and pulled that out of the rubble and it’s actually almost completely intact in the middle of all these ashes,” said Petlock.
Scraps of art bearing positive messages were also salvaged, setting the tone for what’s next for the group.
“Yes we’ve lost walls and floors and ceilings and that kind of shelter, we’ve lost our sort of platform home base that we can always come back to, but the people are still here,” said Petlock.
The Daybreak Centre is already meeting in other locations. Petlock says the salvaged items will hold a special place in Daybreak’s new home, when the time comes.
With files from CTV Atlantic's Cami Kepke
