'I found someone'
Firefighters recall rescue of woman from Polaris fire
Shane Magee
Northern News Services
Friday, June 19, 2015
SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Flames awaited the two firefighters behind the unlocked door to apartment 306. After knocking the fire back, they began searching the unit.
Firefighters begin to blast water onto the burning Polaris apartment building on Sunday at about 1:44 a.m. - Evan Kiyoshi French/NNSL photo
Firefighters Sam Anderson, left, and Seann May were the two who rescued a woman from the burning Polaris apartment building early Sunday morning. - Shane Magee/NNSL photo
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A closet to the left of the door, a bathroom, a linen closet and then the bedroom.
"'I found someone,'" firefighter Seann May remembers firefighter Sam Anderson saying over the radio.
"Oh shit," May thought.
The woman was small, perhaps 120 pounds. Anderson put her on his shoulder and the two immediately took her outside. From the time they arrived on scene until they got to her, they estimate 15 minutes passed. She was whisked to Stanton Territorial Hospital where she was still listed in serious condition as of yesterday afternoon.
They would be back inside the building twice more in the hour or so that followed until tall flames shot through the roof of the Polaris apartment building and an evacuation order forced firefighters to continue dousing the flames from the outside for many more hours. New details of the fire that left at least 30 people homeless have been revealed in interviews with the two full-time firefighters hailed as heroes.
Years of experience
May and Anderson came on duty at 6 p.m. on Saturday. It would end up being a 24-hour shift. They described it as a typical summer evening shift made busy by medical calls. Such calls made up 82 per cent of the 875 total calls the department responded to in the first three months of the year. Fires were only five per cent of all calls.
May, 40 years old, was a banker from Alberta who moved to the city 10 years ago and decided to change the course of his life and became a firefighter. He spent two and a half years as a paid-on-call firefighter and has now been a full-timer for four years. Anderson, 26, moved to the city 10 years ago from Inuvik and volunteered for two and a half years. He's been full time for three years. Both firefighters had been to plenty of fires of the type that broke out over the weekend but none with someone inside.
The call
About 1:20 a.m. Sunday, multiple calls to the city's dispatch centre came in about a fire at the Polaris building at the corner of 52 Avenue and 49 Street.
"To be honest, I didn't even hear the call," Anderson said about the dispatch. "Someone called fire and I just jumped in my gear."
The men, among 30 firefighters who responded to the fire that night, described going through a checklist in their heads en route to the fire while calling out which positions they'd be in once at the scene. Five minutes typically pass from the dispatch to arrival on scene, city statistics show. Coming down 52 Avenue toward Polaris, the roadway was already covered with smoke.
May was the firefighter assigned to hook up to the nearest hydrant – they stopped the truck near the location, the person jumped out and grabbed the hose to connect to the hydrant while the truck carried on.
Lt. Ian Whitford started assigning firefighters tasks.
The entrance
Two other firefighters had already started spraying water through the broken window of unit 306 where the fire appears to have started. Whitford asked for two people to do what's known as an interior attack. RCMP officers had already cleared the building of people. They didn't know a woman was still inside.
May grabbed Anderson and the two got their water hose ready before entering the 49 Street side entrance of the building. They checked their equipment, including the 4,500 PSI air tank which provides air for about 30 minutes or more depending on a person's age and how hard they're breathing.
The third floor hallway didn't have much smoke so they walked straight to the door of unit 306. Opening the door they faced flames that Anderson put out. The smoke was so thick inside – even at knee level – they couldn't see each other while crawling across the floor about a foot apart, May said.
Firefighters search spaces starting on one side sweeping to the other. On the floor they started with a closet.
The woman, whose name has not been released, was found by Anderson laying on her side in the bedroom. He propped her up on the bed and threw her over his shoulder and headed for the exit.
"She was pretty light, so it was a quick rescue," Anderson said. "I've never come across a person in the room (at a fire). At first I was shocked."
Senior firefighter Kevin Hynes and firefighter Tyler Baydak took over medical care of the woman once outside. It's unclear how long the fire, which Anderson and May said was mostly in the living room, had been burning before firefighters were called. A city news release stated the woman suffered severe smoke inhalation.
Back inside
They didn't have time to think about what they had done as they were sent back in to finish the search. After a break outside, they started a full search of each room in the building. On the second floor they were told to head back to unit 306 to fight the fire that had spread into the ceiling.
Firefighters normally pull down a ceiling to deal with hot spots. What they found above was ¾ inch thick tongue and groove wood known as shiplap on top of the ceiling trusses.
Anderson, one of the taller firefighters, said the shiplap was about four feet beyond his finger tips.
"Just to try to break through something at that height was very hard to do because it's very thick and typically we don't run into that," Anderson said.
Unbeknownst to them, at 3 a.m. right above their heads tall flames burst through the roof into the morning air. The order to evacuate the building came across the radio.
"We started going and I think it came across (the radio) a second time and I think there was a little bit of panic in Lt. Whitford's voice at that point," May said. "Any time you get an order to evacuate a building it is time to hustle and get out of there," Anderson said.
They dropped anything they couldn't quickly take with them, including a 10-foot ladder.
Outside
They spent the remainder of the morning at the scene. Anderson was up on an aerial ladder perched above the building directing water toward flareups as the third floor was pulled apart by an excavator. Soaking wet, with a steady wind, he described it as a chilly morning. The wind would pick up as the firefighting effort continued, raking along the length of the building and sending a plume of smoke southwest across several city blocks.
By late afternoon they were relieved and went back to the fire hall. But the work wasn't done. After fires, crews spend around three hours cleaning their gear, checking for any damage and getting everything ready for the next call.
"That they get through that much stuff after everything they've been through is incredible," said Dennis Marchiori, the city's public safety director, about the post-fire work.
For May, it wasn't until he got home Sunday evening that what he was part of clicked in. It wasn't until the next day that he was able to catch up on a bit of sleep.
Their eyes were some of the last to look at the room where the fire likely started that RCMP are calling suspicious. They haven't been interviewed by police yet but would answer questions if asked.
Wednesday afternoon police used an unmanned aerial vehicle – commonly called a drone – to fly over the remains of the Polaris building and take photos.
RCMP Const. Elenore Sturko said it helps to give investigators a different perspective on the scene, which is unstable.
"The investigation is ongoing and I guess they're gathering as much evidence as they can and deploying this tool to gather aerial photos that they can review," she said.
Because of the destruction caused to the building, Chucker Dewar, the NWT fire marshal, said it's unlikely an exact cause will ever be determined.
