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Fire report cites command inexperience, design flaws

Could Joamie School have been saved?

GREG YOUNGER-LEWIS

The Nunavut fire marshal's report on last year's fire at Iqaluit's Joamie School says the building was lost because of technical blunders in the school's design, and the Iqaluit fire chief's inexperience.

Fire Marshal Gerry Pickett released the carefully worded report last week, analyzing why the $10-million elementary school caught fire early one morning in Iqaluit, and was totally destroyed by the end of the day.

In the report, Pickett rules out arson, and instead pinpoints an electrical heat monitoring device under the school as the fire source.

But the report also explores why firefighters were unable to save the school, and concludes that the inexperience of the department's fire chief was also a factor.

"There was a bunch of contributing factors," Pickett said in an interview. "But with the limited skills, experience and knowledge of the command [fire chief], I think that fire department did as well as could be expected."

Iqaluit fire chief Cory Chegwyn declined to comment on the 25-page report, saying he still didn't have a copy, and would need time to read it.

"A whole lot of work has to be done before I'm going to be ready to comment on this," he said.

Before the report came out, Chegwyn fingered a faulty sprinkler system as the major contributing factor to the loss of Joamie school, which burned last July 4.

But the report, based on interviews with city staff, witnesses, consultants, and firefighters under Chegwyn's command, paints a different picture.

Shortly after a taxi driver reported the fire at 5 a.m., firefighters arrived on the scene to find smoke billowing from pipes beneath the school. At the time, they didn't know an electrical heat-monitoring device had caused a spark, which ignited insulation in the utilidor piping.

According to the report, the crawl-space under the school lacked a sprinkler system that would normally tame such a contained fire, as required under national building codes.

One design blunder added to another. Instead of being buried, the pipe supplying water to the school lay above ground, a violation of national building guidelines.

When the fire broke out, the pipe supplying water to the school went up in flames, sending unused water gushing down the hill — robbing the firefighters of water they needed to fight the fire.

Miscommunication between firefighters and Iqaluit public works staff prevented the two sides from figuring out why they lacked water — the fire hydrants were only giving about 10 per cent of the normal amount of water pressure.

Pickett said the confusion occurred because no one noted how the water gushing down the hill from the burnt school pipe was creating water pressure problems elsewhere.

But even with the broken water pipe sabotaging the firefighters' efforts, they should have been able to save the school, according to Pickett's evaluation.

"It was burning approximately two and a half to three hours, contained inside the crawlspace, before it got to the upper floors," Pickett said. "So that should have been sufficient time to have something done. The firefighters are as trained or as knowledgeable as anybody else across the country. But they're only as good as their leadership."

Pickett said he highlighted the fire chief's inexperience based on feedback from witnesses, and his staff, who were among the first on the scene and reported seeing problems with firefighting operations on the ground.

However, Pickett did not list the fire chief's exact mistakes in handling the fire.

Pickett said his office and other government departments have already taken steps to prevent such fires from happening again. In his report, Pickett makes 13 recommendations for improving firefighting across Nunavut.

They include annual inspections of schools; more training for firefighters and their fire chiefs; joint reviews of water supply systems by the fire departments and public works staff; and drawing up plans for firefighters on how to handle fires in major buildings.

A 2003 year-end report from the City of Iqaluit shows the fire department has already started various levels of training under the National Fire Protection Association. The fire chief wrote that the level of training amounted to a "milestone" for the department.

Chegwyn also wrote that the Iqaluit fire department has new pre-incident plans for high-risk and large buildings in the city. He noted a new fire training facility is being built this year in the West 40 industrial area.

Iqaluit's city administration is in the process of hiring a fire inspector.

Other municipalities are also making efforts to boost fire prevention in their community. Under guidance from the fire marshal's office, municipal staff have turned off all heat trace systems similar to the one that started the fire at Joamie until they can be inspected and properly installed.

Also, the department of education will review all schools this summer, and install sprinkler systems in crawl spaces similar to Joamie's.

Pickett emphasized that he wrote the Joamie school fire report in hopes of fixing systemic problems with firefighting across the territory, and not just to focus on problems in Iqaluit.

"The trust of this report was to identify anything that could reoccur in similar conditions in our other communities," Pickett said. "This school… is gone. The benefit was for the remaining buildings that we have."

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