One person dead, two others unaccounted for after house fire in Pikangikum First Nation

One person is dead and two others remain unaccounted for in Pikangikum First Nation, after a fire tore through a home Wednesday night.

Ontario Provincial Police say they were called to the remote northwestern Ontario First Nation, located more than 500 kilometres north of Thunder Bay, late Wednesday night.

When officers arrived at the scene the home was engulfed in flames, according to OPP.

"Our community is devastated to have yet another loss due to a horrific house fire," said Pikangikum Chief Shirley Lynne Keeper in a press release on Friday.

A family of nine, including three young children, died in a house fire in Pikangikum in March 2016.

 "We should not be experiencing this again." 

Keeper says the community's ability to fight structural fires hasn't improved since then. On Wednesday, she says both community fire trucks had mechanical issues caused by the cold weather, preventing peacekeepers from extinguishing the house fire.

"We have never felt so hopeless … our fire trucks were frozen because we don't have an adequate building to
keep them warm," Keeper said.

The Ontario Fire Marshal is currently investigating the cause, origin and circumstance of the fire.

Renewed calls for fire safety made earlier this year

The fire in Pikangikum comes after two other fires were reported in First Nations in northern Ontario in the last month.

An entire six-unit apartment complex was burned in Shoal Lake First Nation earlier this month, minor injuries were reported as a result of the fire.

A deadly fire in Peawanuck claimed the life of a ten-year-old girl in late January, renewing calls for a national fire protection strategy to prevent fatal fires in the future.

Since the fire in Peawanuck, Canada's minister of Indigenous Services Canada (ISC) said work is underway to address infrastructure deficits in First Nations.

Meanwhile, the Indigenous Fire Marshal Service told CBC news it is collecting fire data from Indigenous communities across Canada to determine where they need to focus their education campaigns and increase resources.

A Statistics Canada study found First Nations people living on reserves were 10 times more likely to die in a fire than non-Indigenous people. It also found First Nations people were four times more likely to be hospitalized because of a fire-related injury.

The high number of fires is linked to insufficient housing, inadequate access to firefighting services and scarce funding to maintain the ones that do exist.

Pikangikum First Nation is no stranger to these challenges.

The First Nation endured a devastating fire in 2016, which claimed the lives of 9 people, spanning three generations of a family. Those people ranged in age from 51-years-old, to just 5 months.

Nishnawbe Aski Nation launched a campaign months after the deadly fire, called Amber's Fire Safety Campaign which aims to promote fire safety and awareness in all NAN First Nations.

The campaign was named in memory Amber Strang, the youngest victim of the March 2016 house fire in Pikangikum.

The Amber Fire Safety Campaign released a progress report in 2021, outlining improvements and replacements of wood stoves in NAN First Nations, and the delivery of smoke detectors to several first nations.