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TORONTO and SUDBURY – A senior Ontario government source said Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty spoke with Prime Minister Stephen Harper Monday night about the situation in Elliot Lake, and asked for federal assistance.
“The prime minister seemed willing and now our officials are working together,” the source said. A spokesman for Mr. Harper said the prime minister has offered the services of the Canadian Forces and other federal resources to assist with the rescue efforts.
Amid suggestions that community volunteers are ready to take matters into their own hands, rescuers will try “drastic” measures to reach possible survivors in a collapsed mall in the northern Ontario community of Elliot Lake.
Crews who were pulled from the Algo Centre Mall over safety fears will have another go at the structure relying on machinery, Fire Chief Paul Officer said. They are acting at the urging of the community and Mr. McGuinty.
Officials believe there is one person dead and possibly at least one still alive in the wreckage. Reaching them could require methods that are “a little more drastic, that aren’t necessarily done in a rescue operation – or even a recovery operation,” Chief Officer told a news conference Monday evening. “And we still have to come up with that plan.”
Some of about 250 Elliot Lake residents who held an impromptu vigil outside the collapsed mall Monday evening said they were ready to go in themselves.
Lifelong town resident Dan Lozier, 26, who has spent time working in mines, said he and other men had the training and the equipment necessary to enter the wrecked building in search of survivors.
“I absolutely would go in,” he said. “I know what it’s like to be in that situation.”
Mr. Lozier said his car was loaded with respirators, masks, and hard hats. One volunteer held a hand-written list of people who had offered to go inside the mall if necessary. There was no indication, though, that volunteers would be permitted into the wrecked structure.
Rumours spread quickly through the densely-packed crowd. Around 11:30 p.m., a group of about two dozen, mostly men, heard that rescue gear was being removed from the site. They walked to block the exit, but police officers assured them nothing was being removed.
Earlier Monday, emergency responders detected evidence of someone breathing, trapped beneath concrete slabs and debris. Over several painstaking hours, crews covered about 100 metres, getting within about 30 metres of where they thought the person was. But examinations of the collapsed structure then suggested it would be too dangerous to continue.
“It’s not safe for us to put the workers back in there, because this could be a devastating collapse,” said Bill Needles, spokesman for Toronto’s Heavy Urban Search and Rescue, which travelled north to Elliot Lake after the collapse on Saturday afternoon.
On Monday evening Premier Dalton McGuinty asked rescue crews to try another way.
“I can understand where they’re coming from. I know it’s unsafe,” said Heather Richer, a restaurant owner who thinks she knows people still trapped under the debris. “But I ask them how can they sleep at night, knowing leaving someone that’s alive down there for dead? … It’s brutal, to know there’s someone alive down there that you can’t look for.”
For the rest of this article, please go to the Globe and Mail website: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/pm-offers-help-of-canadian-forces-in-elliot-lake-rescue-efforts/article4370097/