Worker says he was fired for saving lives

An employee who was fired after he prevented firefighters from accessing a massive fire at a pig barn near Rosetown said he was trying to prevent people from getting hurt.

Scott McIntosh, a senior mill technician at the Olymel L.P. production facility that burned to the ground last week, said he felt the responding firefighters may have been hurt, or even killed, had they attempted to extinguish the blaze, which killed 12,000 hogs.

“I saved their lives,” McIntosh said in a phone interview on Thursday.

From his perspective, fire crews may have been hurt if they tried to attack the blaze, as the fire was “out of control” with 80-foot flames and a headwind, he said.

“What I did was try to limit the loss of life and I got fired for it.”

McIntosh, who said he worked with Olymel for three years, noted he’d make the same decision if given the opportunity again.

Richard Vigneault, a spokesman for the Quebec company, said he couldn’t comment on the reasoning behind any employee’s firing, but confirmed in a previous interview that an employee was fired after the fire.

Vigneault said “every aspect” of the fire is under investigation by the company, alongside an investigation by the Saskatchewan Fire Commissioner.

Rosetown fire department Chief Dennis Ogg said if McIntosh was keeping firefighters off of the property for safety reasons, he didn’t relay that information to fire crews.

“He can believe what he wants, but he never made that clear to my people,” Ogg said.

“He just basically told us to stay off the property.”

Ogg said firefighters would have been safe had they been allowed on the property, and crews only would have monitored the blaze to prevent it from spreading further.

When asked about McIntosh’s claim that he was fired for trying to protect the firefighters from harm, Ogg noted: “There’s nothing I can do about him getting fired. There’s nothing I want to do about him getting fired.”