North Battleford Fire Department used the full measure of its resources to bring under control a fully-involved commercial structure fire on Wednesday west of Territorial Drive.
According to the details from the fire department, they received the call about the fire shortly after 2:11pm that day. It’s been confirmed the location of the fire was at Lavigne Salvage, located about a mile west of the city; the structure had consisted of a shop and garages.
Two fire engines, a rehabilitation bus, tanker, a half-ton utility truck and two Chiefs units arrived on scene to a fully involved structure fire. A total of 15 fire fighters, full time and paid on call, arrived to deal with the blaze. RCMP, EMS, SaskPower and SaskEnergy were also on the scene through the day.
According to North Battleford director of protective services/fire chief Trevor Brice, while fire crews were able to put the fire out quickly, the building has to be demolished. Damage is estimated to be around $150,000.
“We’ve still got crews going out there periodically to dab it down still,” said Brice on Thursday.
While the initial blaze was quickly extinguished, crews had to stay on the scene for six hours in total as they had to deal with other issues related to the fire.
One issue that emerged was flaring from the natural gas main. “We couldn’t isolate the gas line,” said Brice, “because it had burst underneath the meter.”
“Of course if you put the flame out you’ve got a gas leak. So we had to keep that alight until SaskEnergy could find out where and bring a Hydrovac in to isolate. So that took time.”
It took about three hours until SaskEnergy could finally isolate it.
There were some challenges for fire crews. The commercial structure itself also posed a high risk to firefighters because it contained a vehicle and cylinders. Brice said that meant fire crews needed to stay further away. They also had to relay water in and out there as well. “Every time we’d run out of water we had to stop operations and wait for the water to come in,” said Brice.
Despite the challenges, Brice was proud of the effort of crews to deal with the situation under adverse weather conditions.
“It was quite an arduous job,” said Brice, noting wind chills were down to minus-36 degrees Celsius.
No civilian or fire fighter injuries were reported. The cause of the blaze remains under investigation.
