Deaths at a Canadian Military Base as Fire Spreads Beyond It
A fire that crossed the fence at Canadian Forces Base Wainwright in Alberta on Saturday and spread rapidly in high winds has killed and injured people on the base, the defence minister says. No official toll has been given. A hospital in Edmonton declared its high-casualty disaster protocol.
There is no number, and this edition is not going to supply one: a figure and an explanation involving a gas line struck during live-fire training are circulating, but both rest on a single outlet citing unnamed military sources and no approved source carries either on its own authority. What is on the record is grave enough. David McGuinty, the defence minister, said he was “saddened to share that there have been both fatalities and injuries” and that he “cannot recall an incident like this in recent memory”, describing the situation as “very, very active and delicate” with the federal police involved. The clearest sense of scale comes from a doctor rather than the army: Dr Warren Thirsk, an emergency physician at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton, said “this number of patients would overwhelm the city of Edmonton… It’s a disaster. It’s a one in every 15 to 25-year disaster.” The base normally holds about 690 service personnel and 300 civilian staff, and its own medical facilities were overwhelmed. The timing is awkward in another way: Alberta votes on Monday on whether to begin the legal process towards a future referendum on leaving Canada.