8 families without a home after multi-unit building burns on Shamattawa First Nation

Eight families have lost their home after a firelevelled a multi-unit building in a northern Manitoba First Nation that has no equipment to fight such blazes, says the chief of Shamattawa First Nation.

"[There's] no fire truck in the community," Chief Jordna Hill told CBC Manitoba on Friday. "[The] broken fire truck is waiting for repairs in Winnipeg."

The building, which had been expanded to nine units, was home to eight families at the time of the fire.

Luckily,"everybody safely made it out" and there were no injuries in the fire, Hill said, but "eight families are homeless and we have no place to house them at this time."

"In the long term, we have needs and challenges to house these families in Winnipeg, unless we can make arrangements in Shamattawa," he said.

Winnipeg is nearly 750 kilometres to the southwest of the First Nation.

The situation is urgentbecause the winter road season is coming to an end, leaving little time to get housing trailers into the community for the residents, Hill said.

"We only have about 10 days to get approved for housing trailers, find them, purchase them and ship them so that we can house these families by April back in Shamattawa," he said.

The community gota fire truck in 2016, but Hill said they've "been repairing it here and there" since.

"It's an ongoing thing for this fire truck because we don't have a proper fire station and [we're] not fully staffed to cover [fires] 24/7," Hill said.

The lack of equipment meant the only thing the community could do was let the fire burn itself out, he said.

"We got nothing to usenothing to fight with."

Shamattawa has lost other buildings to fire in recent years.

In September 2016, the First Nationdeclared a state of emergency after its band office and only grocery store burned to the ground in a fire that was believed to have been set deliberately. At the time, the fire truck had broken down and was not able to respond.

A 12-year-old boy was charged with arson in that incident, but five other kids were too young to be charged.

That same year, the First Nation lost a series of teaching units to arson.

In the spring 2017, flames tore through a warehouse containing building supplies for six housing units, and in lateNovember 2017, a housing unit for a teacher was deliberately torched.