Ben Morgan
Northern News Services
Thursday, August 21, 2008

First there were a couple of smaller explosions and then, from the property next door, fire balls were thrown 50 feet into the air.

"I was in a tent outside, and I ran into the house and that's when my mom and I heard the big explosion," said Guylaine Gueguen.

They looked out their window and saw flames racing into the darkened sky from a storage shed next door.

Her mother, Sandra Zolondek, couldn't call the fire department because their telephone wasn't working. They were 20 km outside Yellowknife on the Cassidy Point road, and the fire was only about 25 metres from their home.

The fire was at 18 Cassidy Point - a recreational cabin owned by Dusty Miller. No one was at the location when the fire broke out.

"The fire was burning really quick so my mom went and got the pump and the water hoses," said Gueguen, "we use that to fill the tanks in our house with water from the lake."

Zolondek grabbed the water pump and a section of hose and carried them to the edge of the fire.

"That's more than a hundred pounds, I'm sure. I don't know where I got the strength to carry it; it must have been adrenaline," she said. "A lot goes through your mind - at first I was running barefoot and I didn't want to waste the time but I had to back and get a pair of shoes."

She said she was worried the fire would spread into her yard.

"Thank goodness there wasn't any wind," said Zolondek.

Gueguen jumped into a truck and starting driving up and down Cassidy Point road, honking her vehicle horn trying to alert neighbors to the danger.

When Gueguen returned with a group of neighbors the fire was burning too close to the road and she couldn't get back to her home. She parked in a neighbour's driveway.

"There were explosions going off from jerry cans and propane. Some of the flames were blue," said Gueguen.

Zolondek said three of her neighbors dragged a hose to the lake and, using her water pump, they sprayed down the area around the shed fire.

Two doors away from the blaze, it was Mary Anne Look who contacted the Yellowknife Fire Department. Her husband Randy was one of the first to get to the scene.

"It took us a minute to get everything set up to start fighting the fire and a couple explosions went off, so we knew not to get too close," he said..

He said the community really worked together..

"But we didn't have a nozzle on the end of the hose. That would have been nice, but we took turns pushing our hands against the hose to force the water into a stream and started spraying from a distance."

Look said it took 20 minutes for the fire truck to arrive and take over.

"They got there pretty fast," he said.

Deputy fire chief Gerda Groothuizen said crews worked the fire and had things taken care of in about two hours.

"The hardest part was trying to dig in and get around all the combustibles to get to the hot spots, but we had the fire under control almost immediately," she said.

She said there is no way of knowing what started the fire, because the scene was destroyed.

From the debris at the scene, the department determined the explosions were due to aerosol containers bursting.

"The good news is that no one was hurt," she said.

Groothuizen praised the way the community came together and kept the fire from spreading.