The owner of a Williams Lake business that was destroyed by a fire on historic Oliver Street will not be rebuilding.

Owner of New World Coffee and Tea House Sue Lachance made the announcement Thursday on Facebook.

“It was very heart-rending at times going through the past months since the fire and we had to come up with some really good long hard thoughts about the process so we had to make the decision and we’ve decided that we won’t be rebuilding it,” she said.

Lachance said they are hoping that in the future whatever the city and the rest of the property owners decide, it would nice to have something new and exciting go in on that block.

New World Coffee and Tea House was shy of celebrating its tenth anniversary by one day when it was destroyed by a fire with Diamonds and Dust Entertainment Lounge on Sept. 20, 2019.

Lachance said she and her partner Brice O’Neill are proud of the environment and atmosphere, as well as the food they were able to provide at New World and drove to excel and give Williams Lake something that they could all be proud of.

“I think we’ll both continue to work. That’s the goal. We’ll both continue on and life goes on. We especially hope that everyone else that was impacted by this terrible event that they all end up in a good place,” she said.  “It’s very sad to see that some of the situations with some of the properties are still outstanding and we were just fortunate in one respect that we had a really good insurance company that worked with us and made the process extremely easy. I mean this whole thing isn’t easy no matter which way you look at it but working with Gore Mutual, they were our insurance company and every step of the way they helped us out and were really really good to work with. So we’re happy about that and we’re happy that we can sort of put it behind us, and we hope that in moving forward that the City itself and all the property owners can now move forward in their lives and hopefully move their business.”

(Note: Listen to the author of this report with Sue Lachance in the audio file below)