Cat Lake First Nation’s resilient members will persevere and pull through after Saturday night’s nursing-station inferno, Chief Russell Wesley said Monday.
“I think we’ll be OK,” he said in an interview from Toronto, where he is attending the 2024 Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada convention.
“Cat Lake is very resilient,” he said. “The people are resilient, and typically humour is something that gets the community through no matter how bad things get.
“There’s always a bright side to a dark period, and I expect my people to pull through . . . this rough time.”
Police received a call for service at around 9:30 p.m. regarding a fire at the Margaret Gray Nursing Station. Officers helped community members try to extinguish the blaze, but the building burned down completely.
Nishnawbe Aski Police Service and the Office of the Ontario Fire Marshal are investigating.
Wesley said “it’s too early to speculate” but some believe the cause of the fire was electrical.
“My heart is with all the members who I’m sure are concerned about the state of health care in their community right now,” Indigenous Services Minister Patty Hajdu said in an interview with Dougall Media.
The loss of the community nursing station has put residents in a “somber” mood and has an impact on community well-being, Wesley said.
“It’s very challenging when we don’t have a functioning nursing station. That’s where all of the health services are carried out.”
Medical records were destroyed along with the building, he said.
It was unclear as of Monday afternoon how many residents need to be evacuated to Sioux Lookout and elsewhere to ensure their safety, he said.
The community’s nurses have been relocated to the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry’s Cat Lake fire base, he said.
“I appreciate very much their diligence,” he said of the nurses.
The blaze came just days after Cat Lake announced a partnership with Finnish company 73Health to deliver advanced remote medical diagnostic services to the fly-in reserve northwest of Sioux Lookout.
Wesley said trailers will be brought in to replace the nursing station building temporarily but there isn’t much time left before the winter road needed to haul those trailers is unusable.
The federal government is coming to the First Nation’s aid by working on the delivery of those trailers, which should be on their way to Cat Lake “in very short order,” Hajdu said.
