REGINA - Regina Fire and Protective Services provided an update Friday on the ongoing efforts to extinguish the major fire at Wheat City Metals north of the city.
According to Deputy Fire Chief Gord Hewitt, the initial call came in to the fire department shortly before 1 p.m. in the afternoon Thursday.
The call came from a Wheat City Metals employee who noticed a fire in one of the scrap metal piles. The fire was located within the Rural Municipality of Sherwood which Regina Fire has an agreement with.
“The initial crew arrived on scene within seven minutes,” said Hewitt. “As they were arriving at the incident, they noticed obviously the significant plume of smoke that was coming there, so our typical response to the RM would be one pump and a water tanker. They did upgrade to get a couple of other trucks out there.”
On arrival, “we did have some concerns about water supply, but we quickly established a water supply,” said Hewitt.
There were two crews and eight firefighters assigned to the fire, and they performed functions including clearing out areas to stop the spread of the fire.
Hewitt said he “can’t speak highly enough of the work our crews did” to stop the spread of the fire. He said they worked through the night with two pumps and eight firefighters to mitigate the fire.
The fire had resulted in a huge plume of smoke visible to the north of the city. Hewitt said they were very fortunate in that the wind direction blew the plume away from populated areas, so there was no danger to the general public from the fumes.
Regina Fire says they will continue to monitor smoke conditions and wind direction, and Hewitt said they would update the public if there was any concern from the smoke. Right now, the size of the plume has been greatly reduced from the previous day.
“You can see an obvious difference in the smoke plume coming from the fire right now, so they’ve done some great work. A lot of the work that has been done there involves reducing the fire load within that debris pile and scrap metal pile. We’ll continue to work there throughout the day, and probably into the evening and potentially into tomorrow to minimize that fire load and extinguish the fire.”
While the fire has been considered contained since Thursday, the fire department had worked overnight to keep it contained so it didn’t spread any further. As of Friday afternoon, the fire is still ongoing but the situation remains under control as work continues to put it out.
Hewitt said a fire of this magnitude will take time to extinguish. While the fire department expects to be on the scene into tomorrow, there is no exact estimate yet on when they expect the fire to finally be put out.
No injuries have been reported from the fire. Hewitt thanked the public for heeding their calls to stay clear of the scene, allowing firefighters to be able to do their job.
There is no indication yet on what the cause of the fire is. The investigation will be turned over to the Rural Municipality of Sherwood and the Saskatchewan Public Safety Agency.
