By Keith Lacey
The fire chief who helped make Vancouver the ?safest fire city in North America? told a coroner?s inquest firefighters were helpless to do anything at a tragic Hanmer house fire, which claimed the lives of three people 16 months ago.
Donald Pamplin, who recently retired as Vancouver?s fire chief and now operates his own fire protection consulting service to provide municipalities with ways to improve fire services, testified the deadly Valley East house fire was out of control before neighbours and volunteer firefighters arrived on the scene.
?The fire department did the best they could do in very, very bad situation,? said Pamplin, who read thousands of pages of documentation in preparing his own report about the tragedy.
Pamplin was hired by City of Greater Sudbury management to testify at the inquest into the deaths of Asha-Jade
McLean, 3, her brother Ellias McLean, 4, and their great grandmother Pearl Shaw, 75. They perished in a blaze that broke out just after noon on April 22, 2001 at 4141 Roy St. in Hanmer.
Vancouver?s sterling reputation as a safety conscious city for fire services skyrocketed only after city council passed a 1990 bylaw making sprinkler systems mandatory in every new building, including single family homes, said Pamplin.
?For the cost of less than half a pack of gum per day? you can install a quality sprinkler system in the average Canadian home, said Pamplin.
The average citizen still believes they can call 911 and have firefighters at a fire scene to save lives and buildings within minutes, but that thinking is ?pie in the sky? and not realistic, said Pamplin.
Pamplin, former president of the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs, said he and other industry leaders have finally changed their thinking about providing quality fire services.
For decades, fire chiefs and industry leaders believed the more firefighters and equipment you had on any fire scene the better, he said.
That thinking has changed dramatically as research shows most structural fires can only be successfully attacked from the interior when fully equipped fire crews arrive on the scene within three to five minutes, he said.
?We will never solve fire protection problems in North America with muscle and hose,? he said.
Well over 70 per cent of structural fires are burning out of control within three minutes of ignition and no trained fire leader would ever send a firefighter into such a situation, he said.
The reality is you would have to have a ?fire station literally on every block? in every city and town to provide a fire protection service that would regularly extinguish fires before they burn out of control, he said.
?The average person still thinks they will call 911 and firefighters will get there and walk on water and put out the fire?the tragedy is that?s not realistic,? he said. ?These people are human beings and they can?t walk on water,
especially when you consider how fast fire spreads.?
Pamplin admitted he worked as a regional manager for the National Fire Sprinkler Association, an American organization with the mandate to create a market for automatic fire sprinkler systems.
Despite terse questioning, Pamplin insisted lives could not have been saved in the Valley East fire.
?No trained fire leader would ever send a firefighter into that kind of hostile environment,? he said.
The inquest is expected to wrap up Friday or Monday.
