Multiple experts needed to find cause
The Halifax Fire Department says it has been consistent in reporting the cause of a Lower Sackville duplex fire that claimed three lives.
Police and fire crews responded to a fire that was contained to one unit of a duplex at 34 Leaside Dr., just off Sackville Drive, at 2:34 a.m. on March 3.
The body of Marven Hart, 58, was located in the basement and Carys Whalen, 11, was found upstairs but died after being taken to hospital. Trent Hart, 18, was taken off life support two days after being found at the back of the main floor of the duplex. Pat Hart, 46, the lone survivor, was rescued from a second-storey window. She suffered minor injuries.
Two days after the blaze, the fire department said the evidence pointed to an electrical fault as the cause of the fire that started in the basement. A week later, the department said it had determined the cause to be improper disposal of smoking materials.
“What happens with the new cause, per se, when you bring in other people, other sets of eyes, to look at a scene, you see other things that could potentially be a cause,” said Brendan Elliott, spokesman for the department. “We said we knew there was an electrical fault. We still needed to dig deeper to find out what caused that electrical fault.
“The cause of the electrical fault was the poor disposal of smoking materials. That was only found in the latter days of the investigation.”
Various experts from different fields were brought in to investigate before the department arrived at its conclusion.
Elliott said the department uses the term “smoking materials’ to include cigarettes, cigars and pipes.
“While we were happy to know the cause, nobody was happy with how this ended,” he said. “What is important is that we now know what caused the fault. The potential is there in many fires that we never know what caused a fault because there is so much damage in a house. . . . In this case, we are confident that the careless disposal of smoking materials was the igniter of the fire in the house, which led the fire to spread and it spread to include the fault that we saw initially.”
A heat pump had recently been connected to the house and the fire made its way to a fault in the wiring that was related to the work that had been done recently.
“That is not what started the fire. It is a part of the fire, but it was not the originating part of the fire. The fire led to several burned electrical wires, which we had seen originally. Then, we said, what caused this electrical wiring to burn? Was it due to the installation or was it due to something else? We found that it was something else. We found that it was secondary to the original fire, the disposal of the smoking materials.”
Improper disposal of smoking materials could simply refer to someone falling asleep while smoking a cigarette.
Elliott said an electrical expert concluded the initial electrical installation had nothing to do with the start of the fire.
He said the fire department originally identified an electrical fault as the likely cause because that was the most obvious thing that stood out early in the investigation.
“What that did for us was trigger a responsibility to notify the public that we didn’t think there was an arsonist on the run in the neighbourhood,” Elliott said. “We were trying to alleviate any fears in the minds of people who lived in the neighbourhood.
“The first point of coming out was to alleviate the fears, but also, when we recognized that there was only one smoke alarm in the unit, we recognized that while this was a tragic situation it could be a learning experience for others to hopefully prevent this from happening somewhere else.”
Elliott said the current building code stipulates that a new construction must have smoke alarms on every floor and in every sleeping area and they all have to be interconnected.
“So if there was a fire in the basement and you were on the top level in the bedroom, the alarm in your bedroom would go off. It was our feeling that if they had today’s code set up for smoke alarms in the house, that we might not have seen three deaths as a result of that fire.”