A structure fire at Duckworth Lake Monday night saw volunteers pumping water in frigid temperatures from the lake to knock down the blaze.
McLeese Lake Volunteer Fire Department president Ian Hicks said thankfully the event was something they had been preparing for since forming the grassroots rural response team four years ago.
“The Lord gave us the perfect scenario that we had practiced,” Hicks said Wednesday. “We have 100 houses on two different lakes here and it’s winter time with a foot thick of ice and we basically have no fire hall. But all the properties have this same ability to get water in the winter time. It’s like having two fire hydrants. It trumps using a fire truck.”
Hicks said he received the call for help at 9:30 p.m. Jan. 2 and responded with a full crew of 10 members.
“As we drove toward the call I could see the fire from a kilometre away and we started talking about how we were going to attack it so by the time we got there we knew exactly what we were going to do.”
When crews arrived, four people ran up to the fire truck asking what they could do to help, Hicks said.
“I grabbed the ice auger out of the back and told them I needed two holes in the lake, these two pumps, four rows of hose and two nozzles. In five minutes both those pumps were down on the lake with holes drilled through 14 inches of ice.”
One of the pumps started up first pull, but the other one was more finicky in the -25 C weather and took about 10 minutes to get going.
Using the two pumps, firefighters took an estimated 30,000 gallons of water from the small lake, dousing the burning two-storey log home for three hours straight, preventing the fire from spreading further to nearby buildings or trees.
Hicks said he still cannot believe despite the fact the pumps were sitting in six inches of snow, and it was so cold out, they never stopped pumping water during the whole time.
“We had to refuel the pumps twice because we couldn’t stop them running,” he said. “If anything would have conked out everything would have froze in two minutes.”
Even the nozzles had three inches of ice on the outside. Water was freezing on the burning building and there were massive icicles hanging off it, he added.
At one point Hicks said he looked up and realized it was snowing over top of them because all the steam rising from the burning structure into the air was freezing and coming back down in flakes, Hicks said, noting people inside the home were able to escape.
Hicks credited his crew for their team work and how they managed to spell each other off when they needed to warm up.
“We are an exterior-only fire department,” Hicks said. “We don’t do any heroics or super high tech stuff. We basically try to stop something that’s small from becoming big. On Monday night no one went near the building. We just stood back and drowned it.”
The cause of the fire is under investigation.