Yellowknife's fire-fighting vehicles not meant for off-road duty: Fire chief
CBC News | Posted: May 17, 2019 6:27 PM | Last Updated: May 17, 2019
“We'll risk a lot to save a life ... But we won't risk our lives to save nothing.”
With no lives at risk, Yellowknife's fire chief says his crew decided not to head out on the ice to fight a fire on a houseboat earlier this week.
"You know there was no saving the structure and they had a conversation with the RCMP and the two residents showed up at the wharf," said John Fredericks.
"So then the decision was, we would not go on the ice because the outcome would be no different if we did or not. If one of the residents came and one was still there injured we would have suited up and gone out to do that medical emergency."
'No ice is safe ice'
Fredericks said fire trucks are meant for city roads, or engineered roads.
"They're not off-road vehicles in that they're heavy. From our perspective no ice is safe ice. Would we make that decision if there was a life involved? Possibly, but we'd have to make that decision at the time."
Fredericks says every incident is different, and fire department makes the best decision they can for the time of year.
"We'll risk a little to save a little. But we won't risk our lives to save nothing," he said. "We have to make tough decisions sometimes that you know don't look favourable to us."
The fire department does have a boat and a pump it can use on open water, but the fire department is not a marine firefighting operation, Fredericks said.
He says the department does a critique after every incident, and considers possible improvements for the future.
"Maybe we'll have to purchase something, you know, to better prepare us for marine firefighting," Fredericks said. "So it's all a learning curve. Every incident's different and you have a unique incident with every call that we have."
Neighbours help neighbours
Houseboat owner Wade Carpenter says he believes Wednesday's fire was only the second on a houseboat in the last 40 years.
He says most houseboaters, and people who live off-grid, know "the cavalry's not coming if something bad happens."
"Many people are self-reliant. Like, you know many of my neighbours have fire pumps and some emergency things to take care of their own their own houses, " he said.
"You can't rely, nor is there the expectation necessarily … that anybody is going to come and help besides your neighbours."
That self-reliance extends to the clean-up of the fire debris, which was off the bay and onto the government dock by 10 p.m. the day of the fire.
Carpenter chuckles when he recalls how they got the float set, some of which was salvageable, out of the ice.
"Like a big dog team of 30 people pulled the aluminum floats out of the ice and [it] came out nicely in one piece."
"The clean-up is important," Carpenter said. " You know people in the bay drink this water so the ice was all scraped clean. We're not an official body by any means but we live in the environment."