Two adults and a child escaped an early morning mobile home fire on Feb. 14, Christina Lake fire chief Joe Geary said Friday.
His department received the call at 1:15 a.m. on Feb. 14 and responded to the incident on Davidson Road in the Cascade area. One Christina Lake firefighter, who lives across the street from the scene, was able to take in the three people affected after they had gotten themselves out of the home.
Geary said that two puppies and a cat did not make it out of the structure, which was fully engulfed in flames when the first eight firefighters arrived on scene. By mid-operation, Geary said, there were 14 firefighters on site.
“They thought they’d [lost] another one,” said Geary Friday, “but then, up comes walking up the street, the mother, the dog – she comes walking up the street looking at the house.”
Firefighters knocked down most of the flames within three hours, but Geary said that they had to take precautions before entering what was left of the building to attack hot spots inside.
“I wouldn’t let anybody enter the structure, being that it was a mobile home and it was unsafe to just step in there,” the fire chief said.
Instead, crews dismantled the exterior walls with pike poles and chainsaws before taking down the ceiling and spraying water inside. Firefighters returned to the Christina Lake fire station around 7 a.m.
By Friday afternoon, the occupants of the mobile home had been put in contact with Emergency Social Services.
With no fire hydrants set up in Cascade, the department’s water tender truck shuttled back and forth to fill up the 750-gallon tank in the fire engine that was on site. A new water tender, with a larger tank, is on the books for the Christina Lake fire department in 2020.
“Obviously if we’re farther and we have to travel farther collect the water, that might cause a problem,” Geary said, reflecting on his department’s effort on Feb. 14. “Because we were just making it by when [the tender] got back, we were just running out of water.”
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Jensen.edwards@grandforksgazette.ca
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