North Van firefighters rescue woman and her dog from fatal apartment fire
Jeff Lee
Published on: July 19, 2016 | Last Updated: July 19, 2016 3:45 PM PDT
North Vancouver firefighter recalls heroic rescue of woman and her dog Firefighters pull a woman from the an upper unit of a North Vancouver apartment on Monday. Several people were forced to flee their home after flames and smoke engulfed the complex at St. Patrick’s Avenue and East 2nd Street. [PNG Merlin Archive] Ryan Stelting/special for PNG / PNG
At first, Capt. Kit Little and another firefighter tried to reach the elderly woman and her dog trapped in a third-floor North Vancouver apartment by crawling down a hallway.
Smoke and fire billowed out of several apartments in the 43-year-old building early Monday morning, and elsewhere firefighters from the City of North Vancouver and District of North Vancouver fire departments were pulling residents off balconies or guiding them to safety down other darkened hallways.
But as soon as Little and his colleague breached the hallway fire doors near the woman’s apartment, they were hit with a blast of gases so hot they could feel them through their fire-retardant clothing. They knew within moments the hall would flash over, turning into an inferno which would consume everything.
Beaten back, and with the fire advancing toward the woman, Little and other firefighters raced down the stairs to the back where they hoped to set up a ladder rescue. But there were problems.
Challenged by a building almost too tall for their three-storey ladders, with live high-voltage transformers and lines beside them and with a recalcitrant senior unwilling to abandon her dog even as the smoke shot out of her apartment, Little and his colleagues knew they had to break a few safety rules to save her life. As flaming debris and ash rained down on them, they carried out what would become one of the riskiest balcony rescues in recent Metro Vancouver history.
“It’s not the best thing to do but it is a kind of life-over-limb thing. We needed to save this lady,” Little, a 22-year veteran, recounted later. “She didn’t have any time left in the suite and she couldn’t go back in.”
Despite the heroics, one person perished in the blaze.
Firefighters did not discover the body of the deceased until Monday afternoon because of the extensive damage wrought by the flames, said City of North Vancouver fire chief Dan Pistilli.
“There was a lot of debris, and the roof had collapsed into the suite, and we were unable to get in there earlier,” he said.
The body was found in a third-floor suite firefighters originally thought was vacant. Pistilli believes the fire originated from this unit although the cause is still undetermined.
RCMP and the B.C. Coroner’s Service are working to identify the victim.
The old four-storey building at 357 East Second St. in Lower Lonsdale has about 30 units atop a parkade, with rear views looking south over Vancouver Harbour. Firefighters were able to get most residents out the front of the ground-level third floor or out the back down four flights of stairs.
But at one end several residents were trapped on the top floor, including a woman in her 70s. Two doors down, the fire consumed one suite and started to move toward her. Cut off from the stairwell and with heavy smoke boiling out, she was forced on to her balcony. One floor down her daughter, also trapped on a balcony, screamed for help.
As the fire quickly developed into a two-alarm blaze, it became a major operation involving mutual aid from the District of North Vancouver and West Vancouver. The city’s Ladder 10 and Engines 9 and 10 raced in. Dispatchers called in the nearby district’s Engines 1 and 3 and Quint 5, a pumper. West Vancouver’s Tower 1, a high-angle ladder truck was also tasked. And for good measure, Little’s Engine 6 from the Lynnmour Fire Station with its four-man crew was pulled in.
It was a fortuitous call, given that Little’s 6-4 frame was all that stood between life and death in a rescue where inches, not feet, mattered.
Unable to manoeuvre their ladder trucks close enough to the building because of the live wires, the firefighters stood a ground ladder against the wall. Extended to its fullest reach and nearly vertical, it still only reached the bottom of the balcony.
“We knew it was going to be a difficult assent because the ladder was at its absolute maximum reach. We looked up and decided rather than try to get this lady all the way down this ladder, let’s get her down just one floor into the second floor,” said Little. “We knew we could access the suite from there and get her out by the regular stairwell.”
By this point the woman’s daughter had been rescued, and six firefighters took her place as they tried to figure out how to rescue the senior just above them.
With four RCMP officers steadying the ladder at the bottom, North Vancouver City firefighter Tyler Lentsch scrambled up, but even standing on the top rung he still couldn’t reach her. He cajoled her to climb over the high wooden railings but she was too scared. And she insisted she wouldn’t leave her dog.
“(Tyler) wasn’t quite tall enough to get to her. The ladder was fully extended and couldn’t go up any higher. He couldn’t get the leverage necessary to safely get her into his arms so I said I’m taller, let’s switch places,” Little explained.
But even then, Little had to make some sacrifices. He took off his helmet and stripped off his gloves. Lastly, he removed his air pack, a vital piece of safety equipment.
“I took off my helmet because I couldn’t fit on to the ladder through the opening on the balcony. I took my pack off because I didn’t want a counterweight pulling on me,” he said. “I couldn’t trust having gloves on. I wanted to have the feel of everything with my hands because I knew I was in a precarious position.”
Standing on the top rung, Little reached for the woman. But even then she wouldn’t leave her dog. It was only when he gave a fireman’s promise that that she inched forward.
“I said to her ‘we need to get you off of here.’ She was very reluctant to leave her dog, so I guaranteed I would come back and get him. I got her into my arms and I held her against my body and used the ladder as a crush mechanism to hold her. I just slowly worked her down a floor towards my team of people on the second floor.”
Little added “I worked her around so the guys could reach her legs and then I passed an arm over. Eventually we had somebody holding on to every appendage of this lady and I gave her a bump with my knee into the waiting arms of the crew.”
He then went back up to retrieve Charmaine, the dog, by the scruff of the neck.
Little said he could not have made the rescue without the entire team, including the police officers. “We were really lucky. That rescue probably took a dozen people.”
The woman, who Little said never told him her name, was among several people taken to hospital to be treated for smoke inhalation.
Despite the fatality, Chief Pistilli said he was proud of the firefighters for rescuing the woman and at least four other residents, especially under the difficult conditions. “Today was definitely one of those career moments for some of these firefighters,” he said. “It was an amazing rescue.”
The building, which was built in 1973 and did not have sprinklers, had recently undergone a critical alarm upgrade, which the chief credited with giving firefighters an early warning.
The improvements were part of a program the city started five years ago to upgrade 350 older apartment and condominium buildings in the neighbourhood.
In an era when workplace safety rules trump improvisation or running into burning buildings, Little said he knows the shortcuts he and his colleagues took may raise eyebrows. But the outcome justified their actions.
“I feel I can defend all my actions. It was not like I was going carefree,” he said. “So I did everything with thought. It wasn’t just a random act.”
The alternative was unthinkable, he said.
“It was a very risky rescue, but it was a good rescue. It took an entire group of people to do that, but there was no alternative. We’ve seen things go the other way. In this case, we saved a woman’s life. That is kind of what we have to do.”