L’ISLE-VERTE, Que. – Romeo used to show up every Saturday morning at Christian Morin’s grocery store to check his lottery tickets. Marie-Jeanne Gagnon was five months shy of her 100th birthday.
On Friday, as authorities used steam to melt thick sheets of ice coating the rubble of the seniors’ residence where they lived, their friends and relatives waited to hear if their bodies were among those to be recovered from a devastating fire.
READ MORE: Search for fire victims resumes in Quebec; 8 confirmed dead
“She only moved in on New Year’s Eve,” Marc-Henri Saindon said of Gagnon, his mother.
“She really liked it there. She was well treated and she had friends there. Her neighbour of many years was living at the residence.”
Gagnon, who was 99 years and seven months old, would have turned 100 on April 30. She had been staying at another residence until she fell and fractured her hip.
“She was in perfect condition,” said Saindon, who added he was awaiting the arrival of a Quebec provincial police investigator. “Lucid. A memory that was still really good.”
Frigid temperatures hampered the work of search crews in L’Isle-Verte on Friday as they sifted through the icy rubble of what, until tragedy struck Thursday morning, was a lively residence for the elderly.
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“The difficulty we have is that we want to be able to find victims but we want to respect the integrity of these potential victims,” Quebec provincial police Lt. Guy Lapointe told a news conference.
“So the steam allows us to melt the ice… without damaging any element that might allow us to go forward in the investigation.”
As the grim work went on, Morin grappled with the possible loss of his aunt and uncle, who lived in the seniors’ residence along with some of his regular customers.
“They’d come by all the time to buy 6-49 tickets, Kleenex, toilet paper, peppermints,” he recalled of his clients.
The visits were more frequent in the summer when it was easier to get around than in the winter. “They were like my big family. I knew them all.”
The man he identified as Romeo showed up like clockwork.
“He’d be there at 7:30 and he would check his Lotto Max and we’d talk about hockey and baseball,” Morin said. “He’s 94 years old.”
Nobody has heard from Romeo since the fire and Morin, whose store is a stone’s throw from the residence, wasn’t optimistic.
Morin’s memories are now tinged by the horror of what he saw shortly after he heard the first scream. He first thought he’d left the TV on before going to bed but then he heard more screams and looked out the bedroom window.
“I was witness to something I would never want to see ever again in my lifetime,” he said in a trembling voice.
Morin and his wife raced out into the frigid cold to help people flee the homes near the seniors’ residence.
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“That’s when I realized the scope of the tragedy, when I opened my eyes and I saw the residence. I saw desolation, we heard screams, cries for help. It was terrible.”
No official cause has been given for the blaze, which killed eight people but more than likely has claimed the lives of about another 30.
“Nothing has been ruled out,” Lapointe replied when asked about a report that a faulty heater may have caused the fire.
Lapointe said there is no way of knowing when investigators would be able to retrieve bodies.
The search crews announced late Friday afteroon they would resume their operations at 7 a.m. eastern on Saturday.
While some 30 people are believed missing, Lapointe said that number could fluctuate.
“People might have been away,” he noted. “We want to make sure that everyone who lived there was there or wasn’t there. But also the people who might not have lived there who might have come over to spend the night there. We need to check on that too.”
Lapointe also called for people who took photos or shot video when the fire broke out to contact authorities to give them a better idea of what exactly might have happened.
Most of the residents probably never had a chance when the blaze erupted – many were over 85, had little or no mobility and were confined to wheelchairs or walkers.
A Quebec Health Department document indicates the residence, which has operated since 1997, had only a partial sprinkler system.
The facility expanded around 2002 and the sprinklers in the new part of the building triggered the alarm.
Fire chief Yvan Charron said his colleagues were able to get to the third of the building that remained standing, while the rest was inaccessible.
The owners of the residence emerged on Friday, issuing a statement to offer their condolences to victims’ families.
Roch Bernier and Irene Plante thanked firefighters, volunteers and the residence’s employees and said they are co-operating fully with authorities.
They said it is too early to say whether they will rebuild the residence, mentioning they want to concentrate on relocating survivors.
The statement made no mention of sprinklers and it said they would be making no further comment for now.
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