Kam Lake house fire caused by careless smoking: fire marshal
Fire chief discusses how crews operate in areas without hydrants
John McFadden
Northern News Services
Wednesday, July 6, 2016
SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Careless smoking has been determined to be the cause of a Canada Day fire that virtually destroyed a home in Kam Lake.
That is according to NWT Fire Marshal Chucker Dewar. Crews were called by RCMP to 124 Enterprise Drive at about 6 p.m. on Friday and found a corner of a deck and the roof of the home engulfed by flames. A man and two cats escaped unharmed. It was the third house fire in the city in less than two weeks.
Dewar told Yellowknifer yesterday that the investigation was complete.
"The fire appears to be as a result of a cigarette butt ash can on the upper deck of the residence," he said. "It lit the adjacent wall that it was up against ... Once that wall ignited, a propane tank that was in close proximity to the fire was exposed to the fire and it started to vent and that contributed to really rapid fire growth."
He said the fast-growing fire caused challenges for fire fighters but this was not the only problem.
For the second time in less than two weeks, crews had to battle a fire without access to hydrants. There are no hydrants in Kam Lake or in Old Town because there are no underground water lines.
Fire Chief Darcy Hernblad described how the lack of hydrants poses significant challenges for firefighters.
"We have to basically bring the water to the fire," he said.
To fight a fire in these parts of the city, fire crews send out an attack pumper truck with two tankers that shuttle back and forth to replenish an on-site porta-tank with water.
"(It) looks like a small swimming pool," said Hernblad.
"The pumper will then draft water out of that pool. There is a big suction hose that comes off the side of that truck and it sucks water into a pump that then discharges the water out into the fire hoses."
While fire fighters draw from the porta-tank, the other tanker fills up at the nearest hydrant, according to Hernblad.
He described the system as one that works well, but he went on to talk about how without a steady flow of water, crews have to be strategic in how they fight fires.
"To the general public it can look like, 'Hey what's going on here?,'" he said about the fact it may not appear water is flowing on a fire at some points during an operation.
"The nozzle on the top of the aerial truck uses a high volume of water, using up the water very quickly out of the porta-tank. The incident commander might then shut down the water from the aerial truck because he doesn't want all the water quickly used up," Hernblad said.
"That way they are saving water for the other lines that are inside the structure."
The reason crews can't pull water directly from lakes is that silt and stones will get sucked in and clog their file lines.
He also addressed a situation that arose during the house fire on Bretzlaff Drive in Old Town on June 21, when a private tanker truck was nearby and got to the scene before city fire crews. The driver of that tanker was eventually told to move.
"It's greatly appreciated but the incident commander needed that truck out of there because our tankers were coming in. In the process of getting that tanker out of the way, our tankers were a little bit delayed," Hernblad said. "It looked bad because there was a tanker there from the private sector and we're asking it to get out of there and ours aren't there yet. It was an oversight on our part and we're dealing with it. The incident commander was doing the right thing by getting control of the scene."
Dewar said that the cause of the Bretzlaff Drive fire is still under investigation but it is not deemed suspicious.
The fire on Moyle Drive in the Niven Lake subdivision two days later appears to have been caused by hot roofing operations and is deemed accidental.
No one was hurt in any of the recent fires.
