Questions still linger over Sainte Anne fire

In a show of solidarity to victims of a five-alarm fire that burned down several properties in Ste. Anne de Bellevue on June 17, council approved a resolution at its meeting last night authorizing town clerk Karl Sacha-Langlois to ask for a report of the incident by the Montreal Fire Department, which has so far remained silent on the incident. "When (the firefighters) don't arrive and a huge fire takes place and it burns out the heart of your small village, then you've got to say hold on a minute, I want a report on this," Ste. Anne de Bellevue Mayor Bill Tierney said.

Residents were upset after a special public meeting convened June 25 where both Ste. Anne elected officials and representatives of the fire department were supposed to be present, but the latter never showed up.

At council meetings, Ste. Anne reserves a special question period for representatives of the fire and police departments. There were again no members of the fire department present yesterday, a fact which Tierney highlighted as he thanked police commander Marc St. Cyr for his brief presentation. "The police are always there, month after month," Tierney said.

However, in an interview with The Chronicle this morning, Montreal Fire Department chief of operations to the media and public education Aimé Charette repeatedly said fire services have "nothing to hide" from the public. "We have a legal delay to respect in case of an on-going investigation," Charette said about the absence of fire department representatives from the two meetings. "Our legal team says we have a delay to respect in case of possible legal pursuits," he added, "but we have nothing to hide in this intervention."

Charette said the fire department's reaction was likely well within allotted response time limits. "I have a hard time imagining the time limits were not respected," he added.

He said it is not uncommon for fire victims, who are in the thick of an incident, to think it takes up to 15 minutes for firefighters to arrive. "I don't have the exact response times for this incident," he said, but he added that four different fire stations responded to the blaze. "I imagine that the delays were quite short," he said.

Meanwhile, Tierney told The Chronicle that Ste. Anne, along with the fire department, have received court summons by private insurance firms representing some of the fire victims.

However, Charette seemed to be unaware of that. "Nobody had told me about it," he said.

Fire services being a Montreal agglomeration responsibility, Tierney suggested Ste. Anne could not be held accountable. "We have nothing to do with the fire," he said. "We just clean up the garbage around it."

Two weeks ago, The Chronicle's sister newspaper Cités Nouvelles reported that a 2005 report by public security to Ste. Anne de Bellevue, merged back then with Ile Bizard/Ste. Geneviève as a borough, had warned the building where the fire erupted was hazardous. However, Ste. Anne director-general Martin Houde said that may have been lost once the city demerged in 2006. "There is nothing like that in this dossier," he said.