With her family helping to deal with a list of health issues that hospitalized Gloria Fred for over two months this year, she was hoping to soon move back into her house on the Tseshaht reserve. But now plans have changed for the family, after a fire devastated the building on May 14.
Most recently discharged from the West Coast General Hospital on March 11, Gloria was staying with and being cared for by her daughter Christine Fred, leaving Gloria’s spouse, Frank Pollard, alone in the house on Wattys Road with the family’s pets. It appeared that the fire started while Pollard was cooking dinner.
“I was just cooking hamburgers on low-medium heat and I was checking on it every once in a while,” said Pollard. “I was in my room and all of a sudden I heard a big explosion. I ran out and it was real smoky, black smoke right to the floor. I couldn’t even see the floor, but I could see the flames just roaring like crazy.”
Pollard ran out of the house to call for help, but had to get back in to retrieve something. He barely managed to get back out due to the smoke.
“I tried to run outside and I couldn’t even see, I crashed into a wall,” he said. “I felt my way around and got outside.”
Gloria’s daughter Christine came with a fire extinguisher, but had to get another one from a neighbour when this failed to put out the flames.
Meanwhile several calls from the area were made to 911, alerting the Port Alberni Fire Department at 6:38 p.m. Eight minutes later the fire department arrived, using both on-duty and off-duty staff. Assistance also arrived from the Sproat Lake, Beaver Creek and Cherry Creek fire departments.
Eventually there were about two dozen personnel at the scene, with three fire engines, two rescue trucks and two command vehicles. An ambulance was also there to assess Pollard, Christine and firefighters.
“We found pressurized smoke pushing out the front door of the house and some heavy fire that was more towards the rear of the building,” said Port Alberni Fire Chief Mike Owens. “Fire crews initially attacked that from the exterior of the building and made it safe to transition into an interior attack at that point.”
Crews of firefighters took turns working through the burning structure, hauling heavy hoses and tearing away pieces to expose areas where flames could be hiding. Usually members of a crew will each use up two tanks of oxygen before letting another group of firefighters into a building, explained Owens.
“It’s very intensive work,” he said. “Typically, we’ll cycle the single crews through for a couple of cylinders.”
The fire was out by 7:39 p.m., within an hour of when the crews first arrived.
Pollard and Christine Fred, who briefly went into the burning home, were taken to the hospital to be treated for smoke inhalation, but do not appear to be seriously harmed. A dog and three cats found their way out of the fire and were located afterwards, but one of the family’s cats was lost from the blaze.
It’s yet to be determined if the house can be repaired or if anything can be salvaged from the fire. Firefighters gathered a few things from Pollard’s room in a garbage bag, giving a grim indication of the extent of the fire.
“That was completely covered in black smoke,” said Gloria’s other daughter, Amanda Watts, of the belongings. “I don’t think there’s going to be much to salvage.”
Like many houses on the Tseshaht reserve, Gloria’s home wasn’t covered by property insurance. The family has started a fundraising campaign to cover immediate costs of recovering from the fire.
It’s a devastating setback for the family, after Gloria recently dealt with kidney failure, pneumonia, severe infection and ketoacidosis, a life-threatening complication of diabetes, according to Amanda Watts. Gloria was on dialysis for three weeks at the Nanaimo Regional General Hospital’s Intensive Care Unit, said her daughter.
“My mom got really deathly ill Jan. 1 and just about died,” said Amanda, adding that her mom was blind after she came out of a medically induced coma.
“She doesn’t see very well and needs care. We were actually preparing the house for her to go back home,” continued Amanda. “Now she doesn’t have a home to go to.”
Checking community’s smoke alarms
In the aftermath of the incident on Wattys Road, the Port Alberni Fire Department plans to visit homes on the Tseshaht reserve this month, offering to check if smoke alarms are properly functioning. It’s part of a project already underway that identifies areas of higher safety risk due to fire, and Owens says that the fire department can provide new smoke alarms to homes on the reserve.
“We’ll actually install it with our firefighters, and it’s all free of charge,” he said. “We’re happy to be out there engaging with the community and making the homes safe.”
The official cause of the fire has yet to be determined. Due to the location on a First Nation reserve, this responsibility falls under the jurisdiction of the RCMP, said Owens.
