The painstaking search through the iced-over remains of a burned-out Quebec retirement home resumed yesterday morning, with friends and relatives of about 30 missing people awaiting word. Eight people have been confirmed dead.
As crews used steam on Friday to melt thick sheets of ice coating the rubble, Marc-Henri Saindon waited for his mother’s body to be recovered. Marie-Jeanne Gagnon, five months shy of her 100th birthday, had just moved to the home on New Year’s Eve, her son said.
“She really liked it there. She was well treated and she had friends there. Her neighbor of many years was living at the residence,” Saindon said. “Lucid. A memory that was still really good.”
The cause of the massive blaze that swept through the three-story building early on Thursday was under investigation, and police asked the public for any videos or photographs that might yield clues.
Search teams of police, firefighters and coroners slowly and methodically picked their way through, working in shifts in the extreme cold about 225km northeast of Quebec City. The afternoon temperature was about minus-16°C.
The confirmed number of dead climbed to eight with the discovery of three more bodies.
Quebec Provincial Police Lieutenant Guy Lapointe said exhausted investigators would suspend the search overnight and resume yesterday morning. He said authorities decided to give the search crew a break from the brutal cold and the difficult work.
The work is specialized, and there is a limited number of people who can be assigned to the task, he said.
“The decision was taken that it was better for the safety, for the well-being of our crew, to let them rest,” Lapointe said. “Meanwhile, we’re looking at bringing in more equipment for the steam.”
The spray from firefighters’ hoses left the senior citizens home resembling a macabre snow palace, the ruins encased in thick white ice dripping with icicles.
The tragedy cast such a pall over the village of 1,500 that psychologists were sent door to door.
“It’s absolute desolation,” L’Isle-Verte Mayor Ursule Theriault said.
Witnesses told horrific tales of people trapped and killed by the flames. Many of the 50 or so residents were over 85 and used wheelchairs or walkers. Some had Alzheimer’s.
Pascal Fillion, who lives nearby, said he saw someone use a ladder to try to rescue a man cornered on his third-floor balcony. The man was crying out for help before he fell to the ground, engulfed in flames, Fillion said.
Agnes Fraser’s 82-year-old brother, Claude, was among the missing. She said she knew she would never see him again because he lived in the section of the building destroyed by the flames.
“It’s done,” Fraser said.
Quebec Minister of Social Services Veronique Hivon said many of the village’s volunteer firefighters had relatives at the retirement home.
“People are in a state of shock,” she said. “We want them to know the services are there by going door to door. It’s an important building that’s a part of their community that just disappeared.”
Hivon said the home was up to code and had a proper evacuation plan.
A Quebec Health Department document indicates the home, which has operated since 1997, had only a partial sprinkler system. The home expanded in about 2002, and the sprinklers in the new part of the building triggered the alarm.
Roch Bernier and Irene Plante, the owners of the home, said in a statement that they are cooperating with authorities and offered their condolences to the victims’ families.
Quebec Premier Pauline Marois, in Switzerland this week for a world economic summit, said she would cut her trip short by 24 hours to return home and visit L’Isle-Verte today, when a religious service is planned in the village.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not