How West Dawson residents can prepare ahead of river freeze-up

I'm in Dawson City's Historic Fire Hall Museum and I'm joined by Fire Chief Mike Massery. Mike, this is the time of year where many communities in the north are starting to get cut off because the ferries are coming out, water is not frozen for ice roads, so we're here to talk about safety. And with that, can you tell me your top three things for preparing your home if you're going to have a prolonged period of isolation like this? Well, I guess number one thing would be make sure your smoke alarm works and uh and we do say that because now on the other side everybody's got a wood burner so you know there's chimney fire that can you know accelerate very quickly into a house fire which happened year before last and uh and and then i guess after that just make sure uh you've got your smoke and a CO as well most most of the smoke alarms you get nowadays are both so like the kid ones they announce it's whether it's a a fire smoke alarm activated or a CO detector so and they say it both french and english most of them so that's a another plus i guess but uh yeah making sure that you have that in place and then and then medical supplies is always an issue and you mentioned that you were talking to some people when you were grabbing some water from the station here and you asked them what their i guess concerns were what their thoughts were going into this season where west dawson is cut off what did they tell you well they said first was it was a medical thing he said you know when we're on the other side and and you know if it's a heart attack or something the chances are are going to be very difficult but they they do have a defibrillator there there are a couple of them one on one in west dawson one in sunnydale and they do have people that are certified to actually use them well i think those defibrillators are self-explanatory take it off the wall and follow the instructions it tells you what to do but but and also with these two skid units they'll have at least a little bit of water to maybe help somebody get out of a jam so yeah it's they they know that that's on there and and that's exactly what the the fellow said he said first it's it's EMS and then it's it's fire you mentioned a little bit earlier about some of the safety around wood stoves i wonder if you could touch more upon that because tons of people in town and out yeah have wood stoves yeah they have wood stoves before the heating season clean your chimney have everything checked like there's a couple of people that are WETT certified they'll take a camera and run it up and down the chimney to make sure there's no like wood burners like where where the creosote builds up that's where the fires start and when they start there every time they start and burn that inside stainless steel weakens and weakens and becomes more and more brittle and eventually it'll crack and then it gets into the insulation and it's it's a nightmare from there just to make sure you keep it clean and you know simple things like if if you think there's a and you well what most of the time you hear it right the crackling and things dropping in the chimney so you take a like a large glass of water open fire it in close it and just leave it closed and the steam will slow it down hopefully help you out that way so okay is there anything else that you think people should know as we're kind of heading into this this period where people might get cut off um just about safety emergencies well you know here's something that's uh that's our fire prevention week is a promotional item or item that everybody's talking about and that's lithium batteries okay so lithium batteries in hand tools and and I had a guy Kevin Warwick he's the president of CanWest fire investigations known him for many years and so he phoned when I had we had the the mammoth fire and said you know he's willing to come up and do a little public announcement about lithium batteries and what you should be you very wary of bottom line with the you know the buying a a lithium operated phone you know bicycle any kind of tools and cars okay understand that when a lithium battery runs away it's pretty well impossible to stop. There's a fire call, Dawson City Fire, what's your emergency? All right, thank you so much, have a good day. There you go. Live call, live call, I mean listen that was the best kind of call to get somebody was concerned, yeah, they thought they'd check in, it seemed okay. Yeah, yeah, that's good, good. So where was I? Just oh, I was talking about the lithium batteries, so we can jump back into that. Okay, so Kevin Warwick is he when he came up his exact words were when you buy a knockoff battery and you're charging it, it's not if it's going to ignite it's when because he's the overheat, like as opposed to the charger's made to do 100 layers and you've got 40 layers in there so it'll overheat it and it'll, it'll explode, it'll and we've had a couple of fires like that in Dawson, so Mike, thank you so much for this, this was really helpful and I hope that people are getting some really good tips as we're getting into these seasons, I really appreciate your time My pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.