Residents of four Sturgeon-area seniors’ facilities will benefit from additional provincial government funding to upgrade sprinkler systems at seniors’ housing and continuing care homes.
Dennis Magnusson, CEO of the Sturgeon Foundation, which operates several facilities in St. Albert and the surrounding county, said improvements at some of the foundation’s aging facilities would go a long way to improving resident safety.
A total of 215 units in Legal’s Chateau Sturgeon, Morinville’s Heritage Place Lodge, Gibbons’ Spruce View Manor and St. Albert’s North Ridge Lodge and Chateau Mission will benefit from upgrades announced last week. Magnusson said he expects further announcements will come on specific sites; the Sturgeon Foundation operates a total of 417 units, including the lodges and self-contained units.
“We’re very pleased,” he said.
The risk of a deadly fire in such facilities was made frighteningly apparent in January 2014 when the L’Isle-Verte nursing home in Quebec caught fire, killing 32 residents. Magnusson said he remembers that news vividly.
“It was all over the news at the time, and so the very next day I was on the phone talking to people in government and in our provincial association for seniors about this,” Magnusson said. “That could happen anywhere. We need to advocate for sprinkler systems in our senior facilities.”
He said he believes the advocacy efforts helped push the provincial government to make money available for these upgrades. The province had initially committed $70 million in November to help retrofit older facilities with sprinkler systems. This week’s announcement increased the amount to $80 million.
For Agnes Friesen and Hazel Manning, who have lived at Chateau Mission for 28 and 13 years respectively, the move to make the facility safer is appreciated.
Friesen said in the years she’s lived in the lodge, both in the self-contained units and now in her private room, she had thought often of the fire-safety implications of not having sprinklers and thought they should have been put in much sooner.
“This is a need. It should have been done right from the beginning when I moved in,” she said.
Manning said she doesn’t have any specific concerns about fire safety in Chateau Mission, but when she heard about the fire in Quebec she took notice.
“I just thought it was a terrible tragedy,” she said, adding even without sprinklers she doesn’t have any major concerns about safety in the facility.
Michael Bos, the fire prevention officer with the St. Albert Fire Department, said the funding for the sprinkler system upgrades is great news, since the tragedy at L’Isle-Verte is something that could conceivably happen here.
He said the staff at both facilities in St. Albert is excellent, and the department has had no specific concerns with how the buildings are maintained and run, but when there are residents with physical or cognitive disabilities it could be very difficult to do an evacuation in the middle of the night.
“There’s not a lot of people there to actually assist in the event of an evacuation, and of course that’s when a fire has the greatest opportunity to grow,” he said.
