House fire kills nine in remote community

Three children dead

Matthew Strang worked on the hydro lines for 32 years in the remote First Nations communities of northwestern Ontario, so he knows that power outages can either be caused by bad weather or by a house fire.

Strang is 81 years old now, retired and has trouble sleeping. At 5 a.m. Wednesday he reached for the light switch next to his bed. When he was met by darkness, his heart began to race.

“I knew there must have been a fire,” the Pikangikum First Nation elder said. “It is sad these things, so sad these things.”

A few kilometres away, a plastic tricycle sat in front of a smoky ruin where a three-bedroom house had once stood.

Nine people, including three children, were killed in an overnight blaze that has left this flyin community 500 kilometres northwest of Thunder Bay — already battered by desperate poverty and high suicide rates — awash with fresh grief.

“The thing is, right now, that we are in a very devastated mode in the community and we are in real need of prayers,” Pikangikum First Nation Chief Dean Owen told APTN in a telephone interview Wednesday afternoon.

Ontario Provincial Police investigators remain at the scene of the fire on Dunsford Road, shifting through the charred ruins for remains and searching for clues as to the cause of the blaze that broke out at around midnight Tuesday.

The names of the dead have not been released, but several residents told the National Post that they are all members of the same family.

Joseph Magnet, who teaches law at the University of Ottawa and has worked with the Pikangikum First Nation, said the houses in the community of 2,100 were “wildly overcrowded.”

“They’re in outrageous disrepair,” he told The Canadian Press. “They don’t have indoor plumbing. They don’t have adequate water. They wouldn’t meet anybody’s fire code regulations.”

Several neighbours rushed to the burning building after the fire broke out. They were joined by members of the local police, fire service and the OPP. Multiple attempts were made to enter the home, but the fire moved quickly, engulfing it in flames and repelling the rescuers.

Deadly blazes are not uncommon in native communities. Forty-three per cent of First Nations have “little or no fire protection,” while a First Nation resident is 10.4 times more likely to be killed in a fire than a Canadian living elsewhere.