A five-alarm fire broke out on Bossuet St. at the corner of Hochelaga St. late Thursday afternoon, not far from the Olympic Stadium in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve.
"We thought it was [our building] on fire,” said Melissa Beaulieu, who was volunteering at a rehab centre nearby. “We came outside and a propane tank just blew up. There was fire to the other side of the street."
A thick plume of smoke hundreds of feet tall could be seen from kilometres away around sunset.
Because of the location and size of the billowing smoke cloud, some at a distance thought the Big-O itself could be in flames.