Thank you for the question. I think I heard it all through the translation and I apologize. In my full disclosure, I should have said that the only French I know is my last name, so I apologize if I've missed any of this.
I don't think it's fair to try to compare what happened on 9/11—with jet airliners crashing into a building and that additional fuel, plus the weight of those airliners and everything else, and the explosions that happened when those jet airliners hit a building that was made out of cement—to say, “Well, those are cement buildings, so they shouldn't have fallen or crumbled to the ground” by comparison to what some of our concerns are with wood-frame construction.
In the Kingston scenario, what I have learned from colleagues who were at the fire—I was not at the fire, as my vision had taken me off the job sooner than that—was that what was ironic, or strange if you will, was the fuel that was present because it was all wood and so much of it was not made out of cement. This was two o'clock in the afternoon on a nice, bright sunny day, very similar to this time of year, with about 100 construction workers on site.
To have a fire start and then grow to that volume, where it did so much damage to buildings not only adjacent to it but also across the street because of that type of radiant heat, is the concern we have. It taps into, not only all of our resources that we could provide in the city of Kingston—we're not the smallest city in the province—but it took resources from as far west as Belleville to as far east as Brockville to come in to assist with that type of fire that was burning out of control.
I think that it got the national attention because of the crane operator who was trapped and had to be rescued by helicopter.
I understand there is nothing that is zero risk, but in the codes, as written up until now, when we're talking about high-rise buildings, we're talking about essentially cement blocks and cement compartments. The fire does get compartmentalized and usually contained, regardless of what's going on. Unless there have been some changes to the buildings or mechanical failures that we've experienced with fire sprinkler systems, it rarely gets beyond the compartment. That's been my high-rise firefighting experience and that is a concern when we now take it to a combustible material.
For now, we may cover it up with drywall, but we all know that when people get into their apartments, condos, homes, or whatever, they start to change things. If they know that they have wood construction, they start pulling off the drywall because they want to see the exposed wood because it can be quite beautiful. Perhaps it's structurally sound, but what we're running into is that the innovations on the engineering side are failing to take in what's happening when our members are running into those buildings and staying inside those buildings. That's the problem that we have.
We want to make sure we take this in a very stepped approach. If we get into communities, like Kingston or smaller, and we start to build buildings such as high-rise buildings or other buildings that hold a lot of occupants, then I think we need to be, and we should be, responsible enough to take into consideration what protection resources there are. A building like this could now become fully engulfed because of the different type of fuel load that we're building it out of.
Are the resources there from a protection and response or from a prevention side and if not, what can we do? Do we provide something from a federal government for assistance to municipalities for their consideration to say, “We'll accept buildings like that in our community, but we get to apply for something that helps us beef up our inspection ranks and/or our emergency response.”
Those are the things that we're trying to say here. We're not saying that we're opposed to wood innovation or the forestry industry as a sector in the creation of jobs. We want that happening in our country, but we also want to be responsible about it when it comes to public and firefighters' safety.