30 firefighters spend 17 hours fighting blaze
Boards in ceiling caused department members to think blaze was out
Evan Kiyoshi French
Northern News Services
Wednesday, June 17, 2015
SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
RCMP dispatch tipped off the Yellowknife fire department about the fire at Polaris apartment building around 1:20 a.m. Sunday, according to the city's public safety director Dennis Marchiori.
The fire department responded immediately to the Northern Property REIT building at the corner of 52 Avenue and 49 Street, Marchiori said at a news conference held at city hall on Monday afternoon.
A Yellowknifer reporter at the scene saw fireballs shattering the glass in an apartment on the third floor of the building facing the rear parking lot at 1:31 a.m.
At 1:37 a.m., an RCMP officer rounded the back of the building to observe the fire and smoke billowing into the night. The flames licked over a power line connected to the building near the burning window, causing several electrical explosions.
By 1:43 a.m. two firefighters were set up below the burning apartment window and asked for the water to be turned on.
With a crack, the hose filled with water. With sparks bursting intermittently from the burning power line, an observing fire department member called out to crews manning an engine on 49 Street to call to have Northland Utilities shut off the power. At 1:44 a.m. water began blasting through a hose into the flaming window.
Around 2 a.m. the fire seemed to be under control, and flashlights could be seen through the windows of apartments on the second floor as fire department members searched the building for stranded residents. Hoses fell limp and water stopped pouring onto the charred structure, as emergency responders searched.
A female patient was evacuated from apartment 306 and taken to Stanton Territorial Hospital for treatment of severe smoke inhalation. Firefighters Sam Anderson and Sean May are both credited for making their way through a smoke-filled hallway to rescue the woman from her apartment.
At 3 a.m. smoke began billowing from the roof again, and soon an orange glow turned into a column of flames bursting from the roof. Smoke and flames could be seen coming out of the eavestroughs along the back of the building.
Fire chief Darcy Hernblad said crews thought they'd beaten the blaze because their thermal imaging equipment wasn't detecting any more hot spots.
"They actually felt that they basically had the fire almost under control," he said. "Then they realized it breached through the ceiling space."
Hernblad said firefighters weren't aware of a layer of shiplap - one foot by eight foot boards - laid on top of the ceiling trusses. They weren't able to breach the shiplap and so weren't able to pull down the ceiling to check for embers burning overhead.
"A pike pole ... allows us to push up into the drywall so we can actually spray water at the fire in the ceiling space. When they were using their pike-poles they were only going through about two or three inches and they were hitting a solid surface."
Hernblad said the decision was made to bring in a backhoe around 6:30 a.m. to pull apart the roof and allow crews to blast the flames directly.
Thirty firefighters were on scene for about 17 hours before the smoke subsided, he said.
