.

Home page

Text size

E-mail this page

SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - The NWT coroner's office has released a report just two weeks shy of the fourth-year anniversary of a shed fire that killed two Yellowknife firefighters.

Lt. Cyril Fyfe and Kevin Olson died after the roof of a shed outside the Home Building Centre collapsed on top of them on March 17, 2005.

According to the coroner's office, the source of the unusual delay for the report lay with the NWT Workers' Compensation Board, now known as the Workers' Safety and Compensation Commission, which did not release their own report on the incident until March 2008.

Confirming that the release of such a report so many years after an incident had transpired is "not typical," deputy chief coroner Cathy Menard said the investigations by various organizations involved proved to be lengthy.

As the final authority on investigations, the coroner's office relies on all information provided by all other authorities to be used in its own verdict.

"We access everybody's reports and then we put it all together to try to come up with all the pieces of the puzzle to what happened to the person," Menard said.

Organizations like the compensation commission, "have their own mandate to fulfill, and we do too. But we have to sit tight and wait," said Menard. "And it's unfortunate I agree - you don't want families (of victims) to wait this long for the coroner's report to be released, that's for sure."

The NWT coroner's report confirms the deaths of Yellowknife firefighters Lt. Cyril Fyfe and Kevin Olson four years ago as accidental, and lists seven recommendations to the City of Yellowknife and the Yellowknife fire department to prevent such deaths while in the line of duty. The fire department had already implemented six of the recommendations outlined in the report by end of 2006, on the orders of the compensation commission and advice from the NWT Office of the Fire Marshal.

"All this work has already been done," said Dennis Marchiori, director of public safety with the city of Yellowknife.

"We undertook all of these well before the coroner's report came out."

Marchiori specified that all but one of the recommendations are now part of the city's standard operating guidelines.

The city and fire department, he said, had taken 12 orders made by the compensation commission to eliminate work safety hazards by March 2006, and began work on implementing them right away.

At that point work was already underway to implement other recommendations given in a report by the NWT Office of the Fire Marshal in September 2005, Marchiori told Yellowknifer.

The corner's only unfulfilled recommendation, listed as the top-most one in the report, calls for the city's building inspection division and fire department to undertake a "proactive inspection program" that includes pre-fire planning for all buildings within the city.

"Until we have the resources to do that, it's not something we can review," Marchiori said of the recommendation on inspections.

Fire chief Albert Headrick concurred, adding that the fire department's dual responsibility to fight fires and run emergency medical services makes it difficult to inspect all buildings in town, with the exception of "high-risk occupancies" such as day-cares, special care homes, nursing homes, hospitals and schools.

"We're looking at getting into it a little more this summer," said the fire chief, pointing out that the fire department has been in the process of rebuilding itself since he took over the force one year ago.

Difficulties the force faced prior to his arrival from Swift Current, Sask., where Headrick had served as deputy fire chief, are no longer his concern, he said. In fact, all but the one unfulfilled recommendation listed in the coroner's report had already been put in place when he arrived.

"Due diligence had already been done prior to me arriving on board," he said.

"The items that were listed are fulfilled and continue to be fulfilled."

The coroner's report is history as far as Headrick is concerned.

"I wasn't privy to what transpired," he said.

"The community and the fire department suffered greatly here in 2005 and I think what we have to do is put our foot forward and move on, learn from the past and make sure that doesn't happen again."