Weekend blazes strike two Yellowknife homes
Fire hit two houses in Yellowknife's upscale Latham Island neighbourhood on Saturday, badly damaging one and reducing the other to rubble.
'It's frustrating to watch everything burn, and knowing that my pets were in there ...just digging through the rubble, we just found one. And we had to bury her.' —Carole Mills
The first fire, which took place shortly before noon MT Saturday, caused more than $300,000 in damage to a house on Harriet Lane. The second occurred around 10 p.m. and destroyed Carole Mills'sduplexat 87 Morrison Drive.
"I have questions about why there were so many fires yesterday," Mills told CBC News on Sunday. "It just seemed to look like it started on the outside when nobody was home. So I don't know what happened."
While no people were injured in the fires, Mills said her two cats were killed.
"So it's frustrating to watch everything burn, and knowing that my pets were in there," she said."And we just found one, just digging through the rubble, we just found one. And we had to bury her. And that's it."
Damage to Mills's home is estimated at $1 million.
An investigation of the blazes has begun. Deputy fire chief Merlin Klassen said Sunday that "at this point, there is absolutely no indication that these incidents are related and there is no indication that either of these fires are of arson in nature."
"When they were trying to fight this one, they got called to another one, so half the fire engines had to leave and go to that fire, wherever it was," Mills said.
Crews also had to contend with a lack of nearby water supply, as they could not tap into the municipality's surface pipes.
"As there are no hydrants in the area, we had to truck all the water in," Klassen said. "And we were also confronted with the very heavy congestion on the roads, which took about a half an hour to clear up a proper roadway for us to respond in with the tankers."
That heavy congestion was due in part to onlookers crowding the one-way streets in the neighbourhood, which is on an island in Yellowknife Bay and connected to the rest of the city by a causeway.
"There are a lot of one-way roads," Klassen said. "There was a lot of smoke in the area, which tends to attract a lot of people that come in to look and see what's going on.
"Then they start parking on the one-way roads, which reduces our ability to get the large trucks in. Then as they turn some of traffic around, they had them going the wrong way on one-way streets which further added to the congestion."