Millville, N.B., lost its fire hall to arson on July 28, 2014. No one was hurt.Jeff Mills
Like any person with two jobs, Fire Chief Marc Pitre of Rogersville, N.B., was busy that Saturday morning, driving his landscaping company's dump truck with his seven-year-old son riding shotgun. He didn't have much time: The dedication ceremony for the town's new fire hall was scheduled for that afternoon of May 4, 2013.
Then at about 11 a.m., he saw smoke. He knew from dispatch where the fire was, and he knew when he arrived there was nothing he could do. In a span of just 16 months, Rogersville had lost its second fire hall to fire.
"It was very emotional for us to accept defeat," Mr. Pitre said about his crew of volunteer firefighters. "It felt like your house, that building."
Things would get worse. While Rogersville's first fire hall and municipal building blaze in January, 2012, was electrical, the fire marshal deemed the 2013 burning to be a case of arson. For Mr. Pitre and his crew, it meant a thorough round of questioning by investigators searching for suspects.
Nor is Rogersville alone. This past summer, two more fire halls burned in rural New Brunswick, both deemed arson, and none of them solved. Nackawic saw its fire hall and equipment go up on July 21, and Millville lost its fire hall, most of its equipment and the attached seniors' centre in the early morning of July 28. The first department to respond to Millville's fire was from Nackawic, about a 15-minute drive on back-country roads, arriving in Millville's truck – a loaner after Nackawic's blaze.
No one was killed or injured in any of the fires, but the damage was extensive and the mystery remains.
"Everybody likes to play private investigator in situations like that and start to draw parallels," Millville Fire Chief Justin McGuigan said eight weeks after his village's fire. "I mean, everybody is exhausted trying to come up with different angles and ideas in order to figure out how or why this would have been done."
"We'll recover," Nackawic's chief administrative officer Duncan Walker said in his new digs in a former machining plant on the edge of town. "The residents are very resilient here. It's just a matter of time. I wish [recovery] was a little bit faster."
The Office of the Fire Marshal in New Brunswick says the results of its investigations have been handed over to the RCMP. Neither commented on how the fires were started, except to say arson is suspected; the Mounties asked anyone with information to contact them. An RCMP spokeswoman, Corporal Chantal Farrah, added, "There is no evidence to make us believe the fires are linked."
The final bill for the three communities has run into the millions – steep considering their combined population of about 2,500 residents. Nackawic Fire Chief William Hopkins runs through a rough shopping list: a quarter-million for a truck (they had four), 14 breathing gear kits at $6,000-$7,000 each, $2,500-$3,000 apiece for 21 bunker suits.
But as winter approaches, all the affected towns are making do. Although a fire wall saved Nackawic's town offices when the attached fire hall burned, smoke damage and pending insurance claims have made them unusable. For Mr. Hopkins, making do means renovations to the former department of natural resources garage – just enough to keep his equipment from freezing.
"We got our PhD in insurance for sure on just how things work and how slow things are," Mr. Hopkins said.
Mr. Hopkins also works full-time at the AV Nackawic pulp mill and does carpentry on the side. He and his wife occasionally escape by motorcycle, but even then he is still working: His bike club organized a poker run in August that raised about $6,000 for the fire departments of Nackawic and Millville.
Nackawic's arson investigation has something the other two investigations do not: a suspect.
At about 7:30 a.m. that Monday, July 21, acting Sergeant Carter Stone of the nearby Woodstock police force was driving through Nackawic when he noticed a pickup at the side of the road, with "internal popping sound from the engine," he said. Sgt. Stone shrugged it off, but he didn't get far before spotting smoke from that direction. Swinging back, he saw that the pickup had presumably crashed through the middle bay door of the fire hall. Flames shot up above the roof while the driver threw things off the back of his pickup, including a small propane tank.
Sgt. Stone arrested the pickup's driver: Edwin Samuel Bradley, 56, a local man. Mr. Bradley pleaded not guilty the next day to charges of impaired driving, refusing a breathalyser and breaching a court order stemming from a recent case of uttering threats. At his bail hearing two days later, he was ordered to undergo a 30-day psychiatric evaluation, and when he was deemed fit to stand trial, he was remanded to custody.
Mr. Bradley's parents, Merlin and Sherill, defend their son. They say he pulled out of the driveway that morning, noticed that his pickup was on fire and then experienced a mechanical failure after he turned into the fire hall driveway. But at his trial on Oct. 1, Mr. Bradley changed his plea to guilty after the Crown dropped the impaired driving charge. He was prohibited from driving for 30 months, fined $2,700 and sentenced to 30 days in jail, which because of time already served on remand meant he could go home that day. Crown attorney Brian Munn has not replied to queries on whether further charges will be laid.
Meanwhile, in Rogersville, two trucks were saved in the first fire, and all were saved in the second because they were still parked in the temporary garage. The town's brand-new fire hall No. 3, the attached municipal building and RCMP detachment boast a new safety feature: security cameras.
And the neighbouring towns boast a palpable sense of community. By 11 a.m. on the morning of the Nackawic fire, Mr. McGuigan had shaken the hands of no fewer than nine fire chiefs from the region who came to offer whatever gear they could spare. "That's a really, really great feeling," he said, "and it makes you feel proud to be part of a fire service that would go to that length."
In the Aug. 23 parade that capped Nackawic's annual Festival on the Bend, Mr. Hopkins drove in front in the town's new fire truck. Mr. Walker echoes the town's consensus that it was the best Festival on the Bend in recent memory.
"That [parade] kind of showed the community that we're back, we're still here," he said. "We may have been knocked down, but we're coming back."