Members of the Estevan Fire Rescue Service did all they could to save an apartment on First Street from the ravages of a fire that quickly spread throughout the structure on Saturday, before cutting their losses, and having it demolished, due to the complex and intense nature of the fire that quickly engulfed it.
Code noted it was a unique situation, since he was one of the first people to spot the fire before any other members were contacted.
“I live across from the Lutheran Church, and I was going to a commercial alarm. As I pulled past Trinity Tower, something caught my eye,” said Code. “There was a fire the size of a lawn chair on the deck of the second level of this apartment building, a block down.”
Fire Chief Shane Code said the fire was an accident and was likely caused by smoking. Code radioed the fire in and drove down to the corner of First and Eighth Street, where he saw one of the occupants of the building running down the stairs from the fire, while three other residents escaped the building through the front door. The police showed up on the scene, and Code was quick to tell them the building’s residents had all evacuated.
“I had four residents and two people saying they were it. There was no way to get back in the front of the building by that point. There were pieces of flaming debris beginning to fall,” said Code. “We backed up to the street, found a decent hydrant, and from there, the call started to unfold.”
Code noted that a picture he took with his phone within minutes of noticing the fire from the top of the street gave an indication of how severe and fast-burning the blaze was. He noted it was for the better that the building was only partly occupied, because of the limited egress from the building, once the fire took hold.
The engine was the first vehicle to arrive on scene, and firefighters changed their pattern of attack to deal with the situation. Code noted that while typically the engine starts fighting the fire, and another truck follows to feed water to it, the engine immediately got its own water source from a hydrant in front of Trinity Tower, expediting how quickly the fight could begin.
“I guess it was good to be there first. The water supply from Trinity Tower runs downhill, so we got a good feed,” Code recalled. “That’s a strong main, and the engine was coming from that direction anyway, so it made sense.”
It was important at the time to get the fire under control as quickly as possible, Code noted, as there were trees and another single-family residence close at hand, that were at an immediate risk. Code said the engine spraying from its main hose was on the “attack,” while the aerial was also deployed, serving as a “defensive measure.”
“We only had two sides to battle with. The alley next to the building wasn’t terribly good for it, with overhanging wires, and there was a house on the other side. We hit the outside and we searched inside to make sure everyone was out,” said Code. “Most fires start inside, so when you go in, you look for what they call the seat of the fire, to try to put it out.”
While things looked all good on the outside, there was a reason the fire appeared to be out around 1 p.m., but firefighters continued to battle with it until later in the evening. The fire continued to rage on, within the building. The reason for this had to do with the way the structure was built. The apartment building was constructed with an older design known as a balloon frame, in which walls are erected and floors are put in afterwards.
“They’re built like elevator shafts … that are filled with cardboard, paper, dry materials and cement bags. When the fire gets into the ceiling, it gets very big. It looked like it was out to everyone, but for hours it was quite big,” said Code. “It was across the roof, inside, hidden. As heat pressure builds up, it crawls down; down the floors and walls, into the basement.”
In an attempt to get at the fire as it spread throughout the inside of the structure, firefighters started cutting into the roof and ceiling, trying to expose the flames.
“I could see the fire rolling around as they cut into the ceiling, from one side to the other, depending on where it could get its air to breathe,” said Code. “We’d put water on it, and it’d go down to the basement, and when we put water on it in the basement, it’d go up to the roof again. Essentially it was see-sawing for hours.”
Code estimates the crew put somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 pounds of water into the building over the course of three hours of fighting it. At the point when fire fighters reported the floor getting “spongy,” Code called them back out. From then it became too difficult to stop the fire from burning, and it overtook the entire inside of the structure.
Later, the front of the building was taken out, and as soon as it was exposed to oxygen the fire flared up again. Losing daylight, with a tired crew and three other calls that day, Code decided enough was enough and called in heavy equipment to knock down the building.
An investigation into the fire and how it started is ongoing.
