Fire Chief: 'I'll never forget how cold it was'

The North Bay Nurse Practitioner-Led Clinic presented the North Bay Fire and Emergency Services with a framed black-and-white photograph of a firefighter manning his post on Main Street East, holding a hose while surrounded by water and ice, two years to the day of the major fire that threatened to destroy the entire city block.

Asked what he remembers about that night, Fire Chief Jason Whiteley stares off into the distance and responded, "I'll never forget how cold it was that night."

Glancing at the framed photograph (see gallery above), Whiteley advises, "The firefighter that was on that hose earlier in the day had to roll off the hose line because a flame came out across the street," from where he was directing the water.

See related: Major downtown fire

For more on the December 2019 fire, click here.

The actions of the fire crews and decisions made by the NBFES senior management team helped save the building where the clinic has been rebuilt and reopened. The fire destroyed four buildings, including the offices of Literacy Nipissing and the constituency office of MPP Vic Fedeli. The gap in the 100 block of Main Street East has since been adorned with a sweeping, colourful mural by a local artist.

Several firefighters suffered from frostbite — one was hospitalized with an extreme case — as the crews fought the blaze for nine hours in temperatures that remained below minus 30C from the first response after midnight until late morning. Whiteley says his crews faced unique circumstances, including multiple smoke explosions and multiple backdrafts in the same response while attempting to bring the fire under control.

Jaymie-Lynn Blanchard, the clinic's director made the presentation to Whiteley as clinic employees and members of a fire crew looked on.

Blanchard spoke about the uncertainty the clinic faced and the perseverance it has taken to reopen the doors for hundreds of clients, many of whom live in the downtown core and face transportation or mobility challenges to access other clinics in the city. Before reopening their downtown site on October 13, the clinic continued operating at their Lakeshore Drive location. Since the fire, the downtown clinic site has accepted an additional 900 new patients.

"Here we are [back in the building] and so much of that is owed to you guys," Blanchard told the firefighters. "We can't tell you how much it means to us and all of our patients. Many of them don't have homes. They don't have cars."

"We were working to not lose the block," Whiteley recalls. "It was iffy if we were able to maintain the stop here [in the clinic] where we did."

Whiteley thanked all of the first responders involved on that December day two years ago and saluted Deputy Chief Greg Saunders and Platoon Chief Mike Newman for their work to eventually safely take control of the fire, while protecting lives and property, in their roles among the first on the scene.

Whiteley says all major fire responses provide learning opportunities up and down the ranks for the department.

"Are there things that we are able to change or things we can learn from to make a similar fire — and no fire is the same — it helps us better prepare. We do that on most significant fires and on many calls that we have had some type of problem or it didn't go one hundred per cent the way," we expected. "Most calls don't go one hundred per cent," he shared.

Acknowledging the recognition from the North Bay Nurse Practitioner-Led Clinic on behalf of the department, Whiteley was pleased to see such an essential service find its legs again and flourish in the downtown core. 

"The crews were amazing," Whiteley continues. "We had to make some hard decisions like pulling down part of a building to get water onto that fire. We are very fortunate nobody was killed."