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Volume 110 No. 22
North Battleford, Sask.
Tuesday, January 16, 2018
Firefighters battle in bitter cold By John Cairns Staff Reporter
North Battleford Fire Department used all its resources to bring under control a fully-involved commercial structure fire on Wednesday of last week west of Territorial Drive. According to North Battleford director of protective services/fire chief Trevor Brice, while fire crews were able to put the fire out quickly, the building has to be demolished. Damage is estimated to be around $150,000. According to the details from the fire department, they received the call shortly after 2:11 p.m. that
day. It’s been confirmed the location of the fire was at Lavigne Salvage, located about a mile west of the city; the structure had consisted of a shop and garages. Two fire engines, a rehabilitation bus, tanker, a half-ton utility truck and two chiefs units arrived on scene to a fully involved structure fire. A total of 15 fire fighters, full time and paid on call, arrived to deal with the blaze. RCMP, EMS, SaskPower and SaskEnergy were also on the scene through the day. “We’ve still got crews going out there periodically to dab it down still,” said Brice on Thursday.
While the initial blaze was quickly extinguished, crews had to stay on the scene for six hours in total as they had to deal with other issues related to the fire. One of those was flaring from the natural gas main. “We couldn’t isolate the gas line,” said Brice, “because it had burst underneath the meter. “Of course if you put the flame out you’ve got a gas leak. So we had to keep that alight until SaskEnergy could find out where and bring a Hydrovac in to isolate. So that took time.” It took about three hours for SaskEnergy to
isolate it. There were some challenges for fire crews. The commercial structure itself posed a high risk to firefighters because it contained a vehicle and cylinders. Brice said that meant fire crews needed to stay further away. They also had to relay water in and out there as well. “Every time we’d run out of water, we had to stop operations and wait for the water to come in,” said Brice. Despite the challenges, Brice was proud of the effort of crews to deal with the situation under adverse weather conditions. “It was quite an ardu-
This is what remains at the scene of a commercial structure fire west of Territorial Drive. Photo by Josh Greschner
ous job,” said Brice, noting wind chills were down to minus-36 degrees Celsius. No civilian or firefight-
er injuries were reported. The cause of the blaze remains under investigation.
Hardy Winter Characters A pine grosbeak sunning itself in the cold and a ruffed grouse off for a stroll. These hardy prairie birds take the cold in their stride. Photos by Louise Lundberg