‘People have to ask deeper questions’
Former worker says fire was an accident, not negligence
“Old people … can’t be moved from month to month. Every time they are moved they become disoriented.”
EMMA CôTé
L’ISLE-VERTE — Emma Côté used to ask the elderly patients at Résidence du Havre what they would do in case of a fire. It was a way for Côté, an occupational therapist, to assess their cognitive abilities.
“People with all their faculties will say they’d run out of the building and call 911,” Côté explained. “But those with dementia or Alzheimer’s would say they’d try and put out the fire.”
Half of those who died at the L’Isle-Verte home fit that category, she said. “They don’t think the same way we do, much less when they are woken up in the middle of the night with smoke all around them. They are in their deepest sleep because they’ve taken their anti-anxiety pills at 9 p.m., and they’ve taken Tylenol for their pain, and they’re not wearing their hearing aids and can’t distinguish between the fire alarm and their alarm clock, and they don’t have their glasses and they need help to get out of bed, and they start to panic and the whole time the smoke is getting thicker.”
Côté (not her real name) offered her thoughts from her kitchen in a neighbouring village on condition her identity be protected.
In the tiny hamlet of L’IsleVerte, home to 1,400 people who all knew someone who died in the fire, everyone is trying to find someone or something to blame, she said — she didn’t want to be a part of that.
“When a fire hits like this, people think immediately it’s because of a lack of safety measures,” said Côté, whose husband was one of the volunteer firefighters called to the scene last week. “But this was a good nursing home, so people have to ask deeper questions.”
On Friday, the Sûreté du Québec announced that 24 bodies have now been recovered from the ruins and eight people are still considered missing. The coroner’s office said a ninth victim’s identity will be made public Saturday, the day a memorial mass will be held in the local church.
Côté, who retired in December, knew the patients and the owners well.
Her role was to assess the residents’ physical and cognitive abilities, suggest the right positioning, and make sure their surroundings were safe.
After a week of hearing that sprinklers were the solution, or that more employees should be posted at night (there were two on duty at du Havre) she added her own recommendations.
On a practical level, why not put staircases on the outside of buildings, so relatives can help the elderly get down from their balconies.
Sometime after midnight, Jan. 23, one victim, Angéline Guichard, 88, had called her son to come and save her from her third-floor balcony. He arrived with a ladder, which he used to get up to the secondfloor balcony, then climbed up to the third.
But there was no way to bring her down. She died on the balcony. He jumped.
Côté also suggested putting people with limited mobility on the ground floor.
In the older section of Résidence du Havre, built in 1997, residents lived on the second and third floors, and would use the small eleva- tor, four at a time, to go to the CLSC, kitchen, dining room, common rooms or doctors’ offices on the ground floor. Why not put the offices and common rooms upstairs?
But she also offered a reality check to policy-makers reacting to catastrophe and looking for simple solutions.
At du Havre, the clientele in the older section were considered autonomous, or semi-autonomous. But those categories are vague, and change over time, Côté said. If residents were truly autonomous, they would be in their own home. And while they may have been mobile and responsive when they first got there, 10 years later, they aren’t, but they have become like family.
“The owners add services to be able to keep them longer, then the semi-autonomous become the less autonomous. And old people are fragile — one bout of pneumonia and they’ve lost their autonomy — but they can’t be moved from month to month. Every time they are moved they become disoriented and lose more of their faculties,” Côté said.
“They no longer have the ability to learn.”
For Côté, who speaks highly of the owners, “M (Roch) Bernier and Mme Irène (Plante),” who would listen to their residents’ problems and talk to them about family feuds, the fire was an accident — not negligence.
But it should prompt government and society at large to look at the reality of an aging population, and the limits to the public system.
As long as a person is not incontinent, aggressive or confined to a bed, there is no room for him in the government-run nursing homes and long-term care facilities known as CHSLD.
The CHSLD and hospitals are cutting the number of beds for the elderly. So the private residences, like du Havre, pick up the slack. If they are forced to hire more nighttime employees, for example, they have to increase fees, already at $1,600 to $2,000 per month.
And more of them will close.
“These are not the wealthy baby-boomers in L’IsleVerte,” Côté said. “They are widows and farmers, some of whom sold the farm for $100,000. … Everyone wants the best care for their parents and for them to be safe, but when we put them in a residence we all let go a little — as people and as a society — and think, OK they’re fine, we feel relieved. But no one can do the impossible.”