Philippe Morin
Northern News Services
Published Monday, November 26, 2007

INUVIK - Two people in Inuvik might owe their lives to Vince Sharpe, who pulled them from a burning trailer on Nov. 17.

Sharpe said it all started when he was driving his truck on Saturday afternoon, near the Balsam trailer court.

"I drove past the trailer and it looked like it had smoke coming out. It didn't look right so I backed up and had a second look. And sure enough, there was all this black smoke coming out the door," he said

"There was a woman coming out the door, she was coughing and spitting," he recalled.

"She told me 'my dad's in there' and I asked where. She said she didn't know."

A former firefighter and captain in the Inuvik Fire Department, Sharpe said he knows smoke can kill.

"I crawled on my belly and I looked around the kitchen area. There was an old man laying on the floor ... I grabbed a hold of him and pulled him out the door," he said.

When Sharpe emerged from the trailer, the woman told him there was someone else inside. He recalls coughing and tapping, teary-eyed from the smoke, trying to find the other person.

"He wasn't in the kitchen or the living room, so I went down the hallway. He had succumbed to smoke and he was lying on the floor. I grabbed him by his shirt and pulled him back," he said.

But as he tried to exit the trailer, Sharpe found himself turned around. He had accidentally kicked the door shut.

"You could barely see maybe three feet and that was on the floor," said Sharpe.

Finally, Sharpe's hands found the door handle and he escaped, dragging the man.

Inuvik Fire Chief Al German said the fire department used 19 firefighters and a pumper truck to contain the blaze.

Sharpe said the rescue was the third in his firefighting career. He saved a two-month old baby from a blaze in 1974 and said he once helped a woman in a wheelchair escape a log house fire on Kingminga street around 1978.