SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - First there were a couple of smaller explosions, then fireballs were thrown 50 feet into the air at a Cassidy Point property outside Yellowknife on Tuesday.

Guylaine Gueguen, left, and her mother Sandra Zolondek stand beside the scene of a fire at Cassidy Point on Prosperous Lake, Aug. 20. The pair was alerted to the blaze by the sound of explosions. - Ben Morgan/NNSL photo

Neighbouring residents Guylaine Gueguen and her mother Sandra Zolondek looked out the window of their home and saw flames racing into the darkened sky from a storage shed next door.

Gueguen had run into the house when she heard the first set of small explosions. "That's when my mom and I heard the big explosion," she said.

Her mother couldn't call the fire department because their telephone wasn't working. They were 20 km outside Yellowknife on the Cassidy Point road to Prosperous Lake, 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 go 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 neighbours to the danger.

When Gueguen returned with a group of neighbours 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 neighbours 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, Mary Anne Look 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.