As Rankin Inlet fourplex burns, firefighters search for woman who wasn’t there

This is how the burning four-plex looked Oct. 30 when Rankin Inlet firefighters arrived at the scene of the fire in the early hours of the morning. (PHOTO COURTESY OF MARK WYATT)

Rankin Inlet firefighters continue to fight the Oct. 30 four-plex fire for 10 hours in below-zero temperatures. (PHOTO COURTESY OF MARK WYATT)

A firefighter sits in the bucket of an excavator to get an better angle to hose the fire which burned a four-plex row to the ground Oct. 30 in Rankin Inlet. (PHOTO COURTESY OF MARK WYATT)

The back of one of Rankin Inlet’s fire trucks is covered with ice after firefighters spent 10 hours fighting a fire Oct. 30. (PHOTO COURTESY OF MARK WYATT)

An Oct. 30 fire in Rankin Inlet that destroyed a row of four rental units caused more than $1 million in losses, displacing at least six people who lost nearly everything they owned.

The blaze turned the building, owned by Aurora Northern Contractors, into a frozen hunk of blackened rubble.

It has also left Mark Wyatt, the fire chief in this community of roughly 3,000, frustrated.

“I’m disappointed we lost the building to fire,” said Wyatt in a Nov. 1 interview from Rankin Inlet.

His 15 firefighters, alerted by a call at 4:20 a.m., fought hard, for 10 hours in minus 28 C temperatures, hosing flames with a total of 50,000 litres of water—but they were unable to save the structure.

One key to this loss: the absence of fire separators under the fourplex.

Local building codes don’t call for fire separators to serve as a wall against the spread of a fire, “but they should,” Wyatt said.

As it was, firefighters couldn’t tell whether there was fire burning under the unit next to the burning corner unit, and couldn’t access the crawl space, he said, so “it was pretty frustrating.”

“We had one unit burning originally, but we lost the whole building because it just kept burning underneath and taking unit after unit after unit.”

But that wasn’t the only challenge in this fire. Valuable time was lost right after the firefighters arrived, because they entered the burning unit to look for a woman who was allegedly still inside.

A man who said his girlfriend was inside, was, according to Wyatt, “incredibly intoxicated at the time,” and ran around claiming his girlfriend was still in the building.

So two firefighters went inside.

“That’s the immediate action, to send in a search crew to see if we can find the person,” he said.

One of them fell through the floor during the search.

“It’s incredibly dangerous. The only time we will really ever put someone into a situation like that is when someone’s life is in danger,” Wyatt said.

The man who said his girlfriend was inside also ran into the building once.

So firefighters entered the fiery building to pull him out, he said.

And it turned out that the woman wasn’t inside after all.

“But that search delayed our efforts in attacking the fire,” Wyatt said, adding that a fire like that one doubles every minute it burns. “We had firefighters in there for 10 minutes for the girl that wasn’t in there. Had we not been worried about someone being in the building we would have been able to attack the fire differently and got more of the water inside the building quicker.”

The cold was also something to contend with, as falling water from the hoses created a lot of ice and slippery conditions.

“You have to keep that water flow constantly going, [so] your gear also gets wet and it freezes. I was walking around feeling like Frankenstein—the outside of my arms were frozen.”

Wyatt said he is grateful for people who brought by caribou soup and sandwiches to the scene—and to Electrix Ltd., whose excavator arrived on the scene, allowing firefighters a place to fight the fire from above.

As to what caused the fire, that’s still under investigation, Wyatt said, but there isn’t much left of the building to provide information.

The RCMP asked members of the public Nov. 1 to contact the Rankin Inlet detachment at 867-645-0123 if they can provide any information about the fire.

This is the largest fire in Rankin Inlet that Wyatt has seen since his arrival there in 2015.

With this experience, he said he now plans to look at suggesting improvements to building code on fire separators.