Brad Sitarz was the first one to get through to tell 911 where the fire was.
VIDEO: Firefighter recounts devastating blaze
Sitarz had spotted the billowing black smoke signal coming from a house just down the street from his own in the still-under-construction southeast Winnipeg development known as Royalwood.
By the time he reached the flaming house, Sitarz could see the homeowner standing outside.
He could hear him, too.
Big, buzz-cut Brian Whitney was cursing. Two weeks after it happened, Sitarz still remembers the gist of what Whitney was saying between expletives.
Where are the fire trucks?
Where are my guys?
Whitney, you should understand, is a Winnipeg firefighter whose hall is one of several that serves the rapidly-expanding southeast quadrant of the city.
On the night of Sunday, July 20, he would have been responding to the fire at his own house.
Except he was on vacation.
And instead he was waiting impatiently for the first truck to arrive, and quite probably thinking fretfully about something his fire chief and union boss also know: Response times are slower in the far south end of the city because the building of new fire halls hasn't kept pace with the construction of new neighbourhoods. Or, as Fire Chief Jim Brennan phrased it when we spoke later, "The fire halls are not ideally placed."
Particularly, he will agree, in the most southeasterly quadrant.
"If you ask me where I'm most concerned," the chief said, "it would be that general area."
But it's not just that new fire halls are needed to serve areas like Royalwood, Island Lakes, Southdale and -- according to fire union boss Alex Forrest -- even expanding parts of Linden Woods and Whyte Ridge.
There's an even more pressing problem compounding the concern.
New homes -- especially those built in the last decade -- burn fast. Sneaky fast. And deadly. It's the way they're built, with so many plastics and other toxic, quick-burning synthetics, coupled with so-called "silent" floors with little wood content.
Most concerning of all, though are the attached garages constructed over the last decade. Many have no firewalls, which leaves rafters open to funnel fire straight into the house roof and under the flooring.
It was a fire that started in a garage in St. Boniface on a Super Bowl Sunday night in 2007 that burned so quickly that it surprised and killed two veteran officers.
The fire at Brian Whitney's house at 560 Shorehill Drive took a similar deadly path. Whitney may have sensed that even as he stood outside anxiously waiting for his guys.
I say that because when the first firefighters arrived, he had instructions for them: "Don't get killed. Everyone's out of the house."
The fire department has learned lots from the St. Boniface fire. It even prompted a change in the fire code that come October will call for firewalls and heat detectors in newly-built attached garages.
Like the St. Boniface fire that killed one of his former captains, the blaze at Whitney's started in the garage, quickly and quietly flaring through the garage rafters, directly into the gaping crawl space to the attic. It did this without setting off the smoke detectors in the house proper. There was no heat detector in the garage.
But, as it happened, one of the family's two dogs acted like one.
When the dog started barking frantically, Whitney and his wife were at home with their baby -- their other six kids were away.
He got up to scold the dog. That's when he noticed the inside garage door was glowing red.
Brian gathered his family and nothing else.
And fled.
Later, as his house was still burning, the stressed-out Whitney would be rushed to hospital with symptoms that, happily, only mimicked a heart attack.
So it was that last week he invited me over to see the damage.
It was while he was standing in the charred remains of the garage, showing me how the fire travelled, that Whitney told me how, before the fire, he and Lisa had stood in the garage and talked about how they were going retrofit it up to the new code with firewalls and a heat detector.
"And, of course, you know, children and everything else. Never got around to it."
I don't know what it costs to completely retrofit a garage to code.
But I know approximately what it costs to have a heat detector wired from the garage into an existing alarm system.
About 60 bucks.
And I know what not doing it almost cost one guy.
His life and his family's.
It depends on what value you place on a life, versus a dollar, of course.
Which is something the city should also consider when they get around to building a new fire hall in the booming south end.
Hopefully, sometime before Waverley West is finished.
gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca
THE TIME LINE
Here's the time sequence for the fire service's response to a July 20 fire at a Royalwood house that happened to be owned by one of its own:
18:49:10 -- 911 call received.
18:50:02 -- Fire halls notified.
18:51:03 -- First fire truck leaves hall.
18:55:53 -- First truck with four firefighters arrives from hall 26, 1525 Dakota St.
18:56.18 -- Second truck with four firefighters arrives from hall 14, 1057 St. Mary's Rd.
18:59.56 -- Rescue truck with four firefighters arrives from hall 9, 864 Marion St.
19:00:41 -- Ladder truck with two firefighters arrives from hall 13, 799 Lilac St.
19:01:05 -- Standby truck with four firefighters arrives from hall 15, 1083 Autumnwood Dr., after being dispatched at 18:53:33 as a third, backup engine.
19:02:24 -- District chief and his driver arrive giving the fire department its full complement.
Elapsed time from 911 call: more than 13 minutes.
Elapsed wheels rolling time: more than 11 minutes.
National standard time for wheels rolling: less than eight minutes.
Bringing your garage to code
A new fire code covering all new-home construction of attached garages takes effect Oct. 1. The code doesn't affect existing attached garages, but the Winnipeg Fire Department encourages retrofitting using the following new-code guidelines:
Five-eights of an inch fireguard drywall between the garage and a living space above. The drywall should be supported on metal furring channels on centre, providing one-hour fire separation.
Half-inch fireguard drywall between the garage and adjacent living space, providing three-quarters of an hour fire separation. All drywall joints should be taped and finished. Sheets of fireguard drywall to overlap the joint can be used rather than taping. Any entry door to this wall will require spring hinges and the same fire rating.
A moisture-proof, fixed-temperature heat detector interconnected with the home smoke alarms.
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