Iqaluit apartment destroyed in alleged arson

ALISON BLACKDUCK

IQALUIT — An Iqaluit man has been charged with starting a fire that destroyed a public housing unit during the early evening hours last Friday.

Nobody was injured in the fire, but RCMP arrested and charged Mosesee Nowdlak, 35, with one count of arson endangering life after a small blaze ravaged two small rooms in Unit 307A-3. The unit, located in south Iqaluit, is part of a series of single and family dwellings known locally as the “Bachelors.”

“We contained the fire in one apartment,” Iqaluit Fire Chief Neville Wheaton said shortly after 10 p.m. on Friday as firefighters and RCMP officers investigated the crime scene.

According to Wheaton, a neighbour reported the fire to his department at 8:27 p.m. Minutes later, Wheaton and a pumper truck arrived on the scene. They were joined soon after by 16 volunteer firefighters and emergency medical technicians.

The RCMP were called to begin an investigation at approximately 9 p.m. when members of the fire department couldn’t pinpoint a probable accidental cause of the fire. Wheaton said the blaze began in a corner of one of the two burned-out rooms.

According to Const. Viral Borkhataria, Nowdlak allegedly fled the crime scene and only came to the RCMP’s attention after a disturbance at House 134B was reported to the detachment in the early hours of last Saturday morning.

“An investigation revealed that Nowdlak allegedly assaulted another man with a weapon at House 134B,” Borkhataria explained.

While investigating the alleged assault at House 134B, Borkhataria said, RCMP officers determined they had reasonable grounds to arrest and charge Nowdlak with arson for the previous evening’s events — in addition to charging him with assault.

Neighbours say a man named Charlie Jonah lived in Unit 307A-3, but neither officials with the fire department nor the Iqaluit Housing Authority would confirm the tenant’s identity.

The incident makes neighbour Jeannie Nookiguak fear for the safety of her home and her five children, aged five to 19, all of whom live with the full-time mother.

“I don’t feel safe anymore. It could happen again,” she worried aloud during an interview in her home last Tuesday morning.

Nookiguak has lived in the adjacent Unit 307B for more than three years, and said the tenant of the torched dwelling moved into the Bachelors less than a year ago.

“I heard banging, drinking, but they never bothered us,” she said. “But we always heard banging and yelling.”

Nookiquak thinks it’s good for the safety of the public that the RCMP made such an speedy arrest, though she said she’d feel safer if she and her family lived in a detached dwelling.

Housing authority manager Susan Spring downplayed Nookiquak’s fears in a telephone interview last Tuesday.

“There’s a great firewall between all the units, which wasn’t breached,” she explained. “Most of the fire damage didn’t even make it through the drywall of the affected unit.”

The IHA manages 424 public housing residences and 200 government dwellings in Iqaluit.

Spring doesn’t yet know what the cost the fire damage is, but said the entire 307A-3 unit will have to be torn down and replaced, a process that should be done in three to four months.

She said she would have had an estimated dollar value of the damage as of last Tuesday, except that her maintenance manager, Eegeesiak Aniqmiuq, went on holiday last Friday and won’t return to work for another week.

Coincidentally, she said, Aniqmiuq was one of the volunteer fire fighters who extinguished the blaze.

“He minimized the water damage to the unit,” she said. “I was told that the place was soaked afterwards, and they weren’t sure how to get the water out, so he put his mind to work and sent the left-over water down the toilet of the dwelling that was destroyed.”

Nowdlak will remain in RCMP custody until his first court appearance, scheduled for June 4 in Iqaluit.

If convicted of arson endangering life, Nowdlak could receive a maximum sentence of life in prison. Courts, however, seldom impose maximum sentences.