Crews work to recover bodies, evidence in seniors home fire

L’ISLE-VERTE — As crews continued to search the ruins of the Residence du Havre for the remaining 15 people who are still considered missing after the fire, journalists got a first glimpse on Tuesday of the charred and frozen site behind the orange police tape where the seniors’ home for 52 people once stood.

Known as the red zone in the heart of picturesque L’Isle-Verte, it is here where a crew of 50 police officers, crime scene specialists, pathologists with the coroner’s office and firefighters have been toiling in the bitter cold and blowing wind and snow.

By Tuesday night, six days after a fire raged through the older part of the residence, another body had been found, bringing the official death toll to 17. All of the residents of the home were between the ages of 82 and 99.

It was difficult, painstaking work as the temperature plummeted to -17 C, with a wind chill of -28.

Andre Duchesne, the Surete du Quebec lieutenant in charge of the whole site said crews have now cleared about 65 per cent of the site, where apartments on the second and third floors collapsed onto the ground floor. But the rest may take time.

“It would be easy to overlook something that’s really important,” he said. “We’re also working to find the cause of the fire — so there are two goals here.”

Investigators are still examining all the hypotheses for what may have caused the fire that erupted around 12:30 a.m. on Jan. 23, including defective wiring, a space heater or a cigarette left burning in one of the rooms.

By day’s end, police spokesperson Michel Brunet would not venture a guess as to how many weeks or months it could take to pinpoint where the fire started and how. But he said a cause will be found, despite the area being burned, flooded, frozen then thawed.

In the meantime, the coroner’s office in Montreal has identified a fourth victim, whose name will be made public Wednesday, and local authorities are focusing on the survivors.

Of the 22 seniors who escaped the fire, six are still in hospital, but 14 have found permanent homes.

Mayor Ursule Theriault said her team has now knocked on the doors of all 500 homes in L’Isle-Verte to offer help, and on Tuesday night, special counselling sessions were being held for the employees of the seniors residence, the families of the deceased and the missing, and those who witnessed first-hand the terrible scenes when fire spread quickly through the building.