Saint John sends AIM $219K bill for cost of fighting 2-day fire

Saint John's fire chief hasn't changed his mind about American Iron and Metal's waterfront recycling plant.

Kevin Clifford said AIM doesn't belong in its current location. 

But he also said it's not his job to try to shut it down. His job is to learn from the Sept. 14 fire at AIM's waterfront recycling plant. As part of that process, the fire department completed an "after-action review" of the incident, which was presented to the city's public safety committee on Wednesday. 

The report made nine observations about the city's response to the fire that burned for two days on the west side of the harbour.

The first said the city's water supply wasn't enough to fight the fire because of the "fuel load" on the site, according to the report. 

Clifford said if the province is considering renewing AIM's approval to operate, "then the water supply has to match the fuel load. And that's not a burden that the taxpayers of Saint John should carry."

He said the landowner or the tenant should bear that cost. 

"If we have to stomach the idea that they're going to be put there, then there needs to be a water supply that allows us to appropriately manage any type of incident that could happen." 

WATCH | 'We weren't winning,' says fire chief of AIM fire:

‘It was a raging inferno’: Saint John fire chief on battling AIM blaze

12 months ago

Duration 1:14

Fire Chief Kevin Clifford says firefighters poured everything they had on the fire at the scrapyard this fall, and it just kept getting bigger — until the Osprey arrived.

Clifford said it became pretty clear to firefighters on Sept. 14 that the fire was more than they could handle. 

When they first arrived, Clifford said it looked like "a car fire on the top of a 60-foot pile" of scrap metal. He said it was about 30 metres away, "and we couldn't get access to it."

Underneath that huge pile, however, "was a raging inferno because that was how it grew. It just continued to grow. You know, we had four master streams on it and that's a lot of water and it was growing." 

Clifford said he was given two opposing orders — "get the fire out but don't deplete our water supply."

He said they were forced to get creative pretty quickly because the city's water supply wasn't going to cut it. In fact, the first six hours of firefighting depleted half of the west side's water supply. 

So the Spitfire vessel was used to fill portable tanks with seawater to feed the "master streams," explained Clifford. 

While that helped with the water supply issue, the department was still losing the battle to the blaze. Clifford said despite their efforts in those early hours, the fire kept getting bigger. 

"We weren't winning. We weren't having a greater impact. It may not have been growing as fast, but it was still growing."

He said firefighters were able to keep it from spreading, but they couldn't get ahead of it. 

Then, by the afternoon, the Osprey arrived and became the game-changer.

If the platform supply vessel owned by J.D. Irving Ltd. hadn't been in the area, Clifford said he would have likely asked the provincial fire marshal's office to mobilize resources from Moncton and Fredericton. 

It wouldn't have come close to the fire-fighting power of the Osprey, but it would have at least helped. Clifford said the department had a "resource gap" and was looking wherever they could to fill it. 

"All I had to do is look across the fire scene — we had lots of water. [The problem] was how we were going to get the Bay of Fundy water on the fire."

To put the impact of the Osprey in perspective, Clifford said fire trucks were pumping 1,000 gallons of water per minute. That's 63 litres per second. The Osprey pumps water at a rate of 1,000 litres per second. 

And it was able to reach the the fire from the harbour. 

"The Osprey's impact, once they got the stream going, it was instantaneous," said Clifford.

$219K invoice sent to AIM

The fire department actively fought the fire for nearly two full days — a cost the city doesn't think its citizens should bear. 

Clifford said his department added up the total costs and an invoice for nearly $219,000 has already been sent to AIM. 

Saint John Coun. David Hickey, who is chair of the public safety committee, said there's no question the city will get the money. 

"We will collect it. It's a bill that AIM owes us," he said unequivocally on Wednesday before the committee's meeting.

The only question, he said, is whether the bill should have been higher. While it includes the total cost of fire services, it does not reflect the cost to local businesses who had to shut down for two days, or on individuals who were ordered to shelter in place, or on unforeseen long-term health-related costs of exposure to toxins in the air, soil or water.  

"So I would suggest, in that case, they probably got off lucky," said Hickey.

Because of Saint John's heavy industry, he said the city already has the most significant risk of any municipality in the province. He said tax reform is required to ensure the city can pay the added costs associated with the industry 

"The current tax structure that we have doesn't reflect the cost the City of Saint John bears in having industry the level of industry that we have within our municipality. "

He said there's "a significant cost to hosting facilities like AIM in this community."

While Hickey acknowledges the city was unprepared to deal with the Sept. 14 fire, he wonders if it should be. 

"Should we have that level of infrastructure, of cost burden on the taxpayers of Saint John to be able address a potential scenario like that when we're not getting the tax support and the tax reform we've been calling for in order to be able to afford it?"

He also said the province bears some "culpability" for the city not being able to adequately fight the fire because AIM was "operating outside of the bounds of what the scope of that approval allowed." 

Clifford pointed out the same thing, saying AIM's environmental impact assessment "was based on a certain volume of fuel loads and they weren't the fuel loads we had that day." 

CBC has repeatedly asked AIM for comment, but the company has not responded to interview requests. 

It did send a written statement late Wednesday afternoon that said the company is "reviewing the findings" of the task force and is "working diligently to concretely take the steps that are necessary to prevent a similar incident from reoccurring in the future."

The company did not elaborate on what those steps will be.