The investigation into the fire that caused significant damage to T&T Repair on Dec. 10 is continuing.
The Estevan Fire Rescue Service was alerted to the blaze shortly after 7 a.m. and upon arriving on the scene found the shop area of the Kensington Avenue based business completely engulfed in flames.
Deputy Fire Chief Dale Feser said the department's immediate focus was to prevent the blaze from spreading to the shop area and neighbouring business, Apex Distribution.
"Our arriving fire crews established exposure protection streams, to save the Apex building from starting on fire," Feser said. "Our next arriving engine, being the (T-Rex aerial truck) was dedicated to stopping the spread of the fire in the involved building."
Feser added last week's fire was the first opportunity the department had to use their T-Rex aerial truck in an actual fire. The City of Estevan purchased the unit at a cost of well over $1 million and Feser said they were "thoroughly impressed" with it.
"Once we got the aerial master stream up and in place, that really stopped the spread of the fire from the main shop to the office complex," he said. "We were able to stop the fire dead in its tracks, prevent the spread, safely work and dump lots of water on there.
"We were talking after and said had we had the same equipment, there is no way we would have been able to stop that fire; we would probably have lost that full building. It definitely saved a lot of work and a lot of time."
Feser added that one of the most important features of the aerial unit is that it can be controlled by just two firefighters, with one sitting at the turntable operating system located at the base of the arm and another with a remote control.
"It frees up our manpower resources to do other things on the scene," Feser said. "It didn't go without some hiccups. It is a very thirsty truck, so water for fire suppression is definitely an issue, so we have to have a fairly secure and well-established water supply in order to use it effectively. We never ran into that on this particular fire. We had a good strong hydrant that had a 10-inch main so were able to supply water to that truck and it worked beyond our imagination."
Feser said there were no employees in the building at the time of the fire. He also wished to thank the staff of Apex Distribution who allowed the firefighters to use their business to warm up while they were battling the blaze. The temperature at the time of the fire was below -30 Celsius with the wind chill.
"They did a bang up job by providing a place for our firefighters to warm up while we were rehabbing them. We were all kind of frozen stiff."
