Tent fire situation getting ‘scary’ in HRM

Michael Baker was largely unfazed by a weekend tent fire at the homeless encampment in the Grand Parade in Halifax.

The pending windstorm forecast for Monday afternoon and evening didn’t seem to jar him much either.

“We’ll have to wait and find out,” Baker, who has been living in a tent in the shadow of Halifax City Hall since Nov. 6, said of the projected windstorm.

“It was scary at first but I was sleeping, actually,” Baker said of the fire in a tent across the square from his on Saturday morning.

“I didn’t really know what was going on.”

Baker was adamant that a propane heater was not the cause of the fire that destroyed the tent and whatever possessions were inside. No one was injured.

“We just don’t know what it was,” he said of the cause of the fire.

Steve Wilsack, who has been volunteering at Grand Parade for the past three weeks, said that at about 8 a.m. on Saturday “three of the residents came running toward me, screaming that the tent was on fire.”

Wilsack, who has been staying at the encampment along with fellow volunteer Matt Grant, said Monday that he grabbed a fire extinguisher to try to put out the fire, went to his vehicle parked in the square to get another extinguisher and finally tried to douse the fire with water and a blanket before firefighters arrived.

“In my opinion, it was caused by a propane heater and a blanket catching on fire,” Wilsack said, adding that if it had burned for another half minute or so, “there’s a possibility that there would have been a propane explosion.”

There were 28 tents in Parade Square on Monday, 24 of which were the Eskimo QuickFish3 tents that have been provided through a GoFundMe campaign spearheaded by Wilsack and Grant.

Halifax Regional Municipality had designated 10 other areas as outdoor sheltering locations. There have been a series of serious tent issues at encampments, whether in designated areas or makeshift sites, in past weeks.  

On Thursday, a fire crew doused a tent fire at the Victoria Park encampment and on Nov. 28, a father of two in his 50s named Dan was found dead in the tent he had been living in for the past six months at a homeless encampment on Wyse Road in Dartmouth.

Two people in the camp who knew Dan said he had been using a propane heater to keep warm in the tent, and they feared he may have died from carbon monoxide poisoning.

On Sunday morning, there was a tent fire in that same Wyse Road encampment and Deputy Chief Dave Meldrum of Halifax Regional Fire and Emergency said it was caused accidentally by a person using a propane-fuelled portable heater.

Meldrum said there was insufficient evidence to determine the cause of the Grand Parade blaze.

District Fire Chief Dave Slaunwhite said there have been a “couple of fires recently,” including one he attended in which the cause was a propane Bunsen burner. 

Slaunwhite said the fire department wouldn’t recommend the use of propane heaters to keep the inside of a tent warm but “we can’t force people not to do it either.”

According to the list compiled by the Affordable Housing Association of Nova Scotia, there were 1,068 actively homeless people in HRM as of Dec. 5.

Coun. Pam Lovelace (Hammonds Plains-St. Margarets) said part of the issue is that a growing number of homeless people come into Halifax seeking shelter and wraparound services.

“Ideally, the municipality would be working hand in hand with the province to support this homelessness crisis that we are seeing and our housing team is doing everything that we can to provide advice, to provide guidance on what we’re seeing on the ground to provincial staff and provincial ministers and deputy ministers, but we have serious concerns and fire is one of them,” Lovelace said.

“We can’t always have emergency services personnel at every single encampment but we know that through substance use and through traumatic experiences that people have had — they are living in tents — they need to stay warm and some people are unfortunately using unsafe heating equipment in order to stay warm.”

Lovelace said the ideal situation would be to have the people who are sleeping in tents referred to a shelter.

She said there is no viable provincial justification for the promised pilot shelters, now delayed until at least February, to be up and running by now. 

Lovelace said there is no real point for HRM to designate tent sites.

“People are going to go where they need to go, where their communities, where their friends are, where it feels safe,” Lovelace said. 
“When people are coming in from outside, they don’t know where the designated sites are, they don’t care. They just know that they need a place to go where they are safe and they can get some sleep and wake up in the morning and get whatever resources they can find that are available in HRM.”

Lovelace said Halifax police and fire services personnel connect with people in the encampments to talk about the safe use of different apparatuses.

“It takes time for people to understand how to live outside if they’ve never done that before,” she said. 

“You don’t just wake up one day and say, ‘Hey, I’m homeless and now I gotta figure out I can do this.’ It takes a great toll, it’s extremely depressing, mentally there is a lot of anguish and anxiety that a person personally feels. . . . It’s hard for us to just assume they are going to cope. 

Lovelace said that is why it’s important to have outreach workers and emergency service personnel building a relationship, ensuring that some of the risk is averted and that people living in the tent encampments have the information and knowledge to live safely.

Baker said he has two electric heaters that he can plug into the large generator on site in the Grand Parade, plus a propane heater that he only uses during daylight hours when he is awake.

“It’s not dangerous at all,” Baker said. “When it gets too warm, I shut it off.”

Baker said he hasn’t seen anyone in the encampment providing safety advice.

“I would just tell them I’ll do what I want,” he said. “My tent, my rules.”