'We couldn't get ahead of the fire:' Rankin Inlet fire chief on battling fourplex blaze

Rankin Inlet's fire chief says fighting a weekend apartment blaze that spread from unit to unit and included a false alarm about a person in danger was'pretty frustrating.'

"I wasn't very happy with the way this turned out," says Fire Chief Mark Wyatt.

"As a fire chief it's pretty frustrating when you lose a building and you got 14 firefighters that are working hard to save it."

Wyatt says the RCMP and fire department are both investigating the fire.

"It's been deemed suspicious and we are not really sure what caused it yet," he says.

The fire department received a call about the fire at around 4:20 a.m. and Wyatt was the second firefighter on the scene.

"Our first challenge was that there was a report that there could be an occupant inside the building. Our priority immediately was to deal with that."

He said his team of 14 firefighters all on-call volunteers scrambled into action.

"I sent two firefighters into a situation that normally I probably wouldn't have immediately but we were trying to save someone," he said.

A man at the scene told firefighters his girlfriend was inside the building.

"Her boyfriend who was quite intoxicated at the time was insisting that she was inside," said Wyatt.

Despite the firefighters' quick response the man decided to take matters into his own hands.

"He went into the building; we had to pull him out," said Wyatt.

Floor collapses beneath firefighter

The firefighters did a full search of the building as the flames raged around them and one of them had a nearly fatal accident.

"One of my firefighters fell through the floor;the floor collapsed underneath him," said Wyatt.

The other firefighters got him out and that's when the chief decided to call off the search.

"The situation was just too unsafe," said Wyatt.

Ultimately the woman in question was located she was not actually in the building.

Fire spreadthrough crawl space

At that point the focus turned to extinguishing the blaze.

By that time the fire underneath the building was spreading to the next suiteas there was no fire separation in the crawl spaces.

"We started to knock down the one suite and the next suite started to flare up," he said.

"It just continued that way. We couldn't get ahead of the fire."

Despite their attempts to subdue the blaze, the fire consumed the fourplex.

No one was significantly injured during the fire.

There was significant loss of property. The value of the lost fourplex is estimated at $900,000 and the lost contents are approximately $100,000, saidWyatt.

Support from community

He said the design ofthe building had a lot to do with the firefighters' inability to extinguish the blaze. He said manybuildings have a built-in fire separation between units which assists in controlling and isolating a fire.

"That was in the attic but it wasn't in the crawl space underneath," saidWyatt.

The building design does conform with code but Wyatt wants changes to prevent a similar incident from happening again.

"I will definitely be looking into things with building owners and construction companies to come up with some kind of strategy to make sure it doesn't happen again."

Wyatt addedhe's grateful for the support from the community, as people showedup with sandwiches, coffee, and even a pot of caribou stew to support the firefighters while they worked.