Johanna Whitecalf didn’t think she would make it out of her apartment building alive.
“I knew I was going to die there,” she recalled in an interview with Global News.
Whitecalf was one of many of the residents forced to evacuate from their North Battleford, Sask., apartment building after a fire on Jan. 3.
She was woken by her two sons early that morning saying there was a fire in the building.
Whitecalf said the hallway was filling with smoke and her only thought was to get out of the building.
Although she wasn’t scared, Whitecalf thought she wouldn’t make it out alive.
“Because of my lungs. I couldn’t breathe and I was breathing smoke,” she said.
“I thought. ‘My lungs can’t take it. I’m not going to make it. I’m not going to make it out of this.’”
Although she couldn’t see anything due to the smoke, Whitecalf made it to the stairs on the second floor of the building.
“I found the railing and I and I grabbed it and it was just hot. It wasn’t red hot, but it was hot,” she said.
“And I thought, ‘Better me burning my hand and rolling all the way down the stairs and breaking a hip.’”
She made it outside, collapsed in the snow “and just coughed my lungs out.”
Battlefords RCMP said the building was engulfed in flames when officers arrived at the building in the 1400 block of 102nd Street at around 1:30 a.m.
Police said “a number” of residents were taken to hospital with injuries, but have not provided an update on their conditions.
Whitecalf is now staying in Sweetgrass after being treated in hospital.
She has not yet been back to her apartment to see what possessions she can recover.
“When we drove by yesterday, the street was cordoned off.
“There was still smoke coming from the building and it looked like the roof had caved in here and there on the top.”
Whitecalf, who recently moved into the building, said the area is a “hot spot” for transient people.
“Sometimes we’d come out of the building, and there’d be about five or six people sitting around by entrance with their backpacks,” she said.
“And even in the back, there was garbage strewn all over the place.”
She said in the days before the fire, the fire alarms in the building had been sounding.
“The last couple of days, they were going off periodically and they’d be on for a few minutes and they go off and I thought, ‘That is probably somebody playing with the fire alarm again.’”
The alarms also went off for a couple of minutes on the evening before the fire before shutting off.
RCMP believe the fire may be suspicious and fire investigators with the Saskatchewan Public Safety Agency (SPSA) are assisting with the investigation.
The SPSA said they are attending the fire scene on Tuesday to determine the cause and origin of the fire.
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