Not even a month into 2022 and Jon Pegg, the Ontario Fire Marshal, is already reporting 17 people have died in fires.
“My hope for 2022 was that fire facilities stats would improve and, sadly, they’ve gone the wrong way,” he said in video posted on social media, later these deaths could have been prevented.
Pegg said he hopes the video goes viral. “I don’t think Ontarians are getting the message,” he bluntly put it.
Larry Brassard, the interim fire chief for the Huntsville/Lake of Bays Fire Department, spent one year with the fire marshal’s office with the fire investigation department. “That meant we were sending investigators to all these scenes where people died,” he explains.
Being that he worked alongside them Brassard credits the work fire investigators do. “No one wants to go and dig a body out of a basement, but that’s the reality of what happens,” he says. Brassard adds the work they do investigating fires saves lives.
His passion for fire safety was obvious when talking about what people can do to prevent fires. Brassard says it starts with making sure your smoke alarm has fresh batteries in it. He adds that having a fire escape plan is just as vital. “You need to know what to do if the alarm goes off at 3 AM,” he says.
According to Brassard, the two leading causes are people dying in fires are smoking indoors and leaving the kitchen while cooking.
“These actions are really easy to take but everybody has to take them,” he says. “People cannot be passive about fire safety, especially when the weather is so cold.”
What frustrates Brassard is that this message has been repeated for decades but it seems, echoing what his former boss said, the message isn’t getting across. He believes some people still have the mentality think “oh, it won’t happen to me,” but says it could happen to anyone, anywhere, at any time.
“My plea as the interim chief here in Huntsville and Lake of Bays is for people to take real action themselves,” Brassard says.
With files from Martin Halek