‘Devastating’ to lose member in line of duty, fire chief says

SASKATOON The chief of Rosetown’s fire department was in a meeting when he learned that a paramedic from Meadow Lake’s emergency medical services unit was among three dead in a highway collision near Beauval.

The news hit hard for Dennis Ogg, a 45-year firefighter who knows exactly how it feels to lose, in the line of duty, a member of what he calls the first responder family.

Almost a year after a Nov. 20, 2018, crash in which 46-year-old volunteer firefighter Darrell Morrison was fatally struck by a tractor-trailer while responding to a highway crash, an on-duty Meadow Lake paramedic — as well as a 12-year-old boy and one-year-old girl — died Friday in a two-vehicle collision south of Beauval.

“It’s devastating,” Ogg said Monday in an interview.

While the feelings of guilt and anger have subsided over the last 11 months, Ogg said they have not disappeared. Neither have the panic attacks or night terrors, for which he sees a counsellor a couple of times a month.

Ogg said while he doesn’t know how he or the Rosetown fire department will handle the one-year anniversary of Morrison’s death, he does have suggestions for what the people at Meadow Lake EMS should do.

“Talk to each other. Stay close to each other. Look out for each other. The big one is talk. Mental health is there. It’s an illness, and we’re never going to conquer it if we don’t talk about it,” he said.

The Meadow Lake paramedic, who has yet to be publicly identified, along with 12-year-old Jerome Coulineur and one-year-old Kinzey Angeline Iron-couillonneur, died in a collision between an ambulance and truck on Friday around 5 p.m.