Two weeks after a plane crash left four people dead, community members of North Spirit Lake First Nations remain skeptical about the safety of air travel in their area.
Don Campbell, who lost his sister-in-law Martha Campbell in the crash, was one of the people who tried to put out the fire. Martha Campbell was the mother of two children and it's been a difficult couple of weeks since she died, Don Campbell said.
“We’re feeling rough, very rough,” Campbell said. “We were coming to pick her up in the morning. She was coming here to work. She was a very helpful lady.”
Campbell said those who don’t understand the community wonder why they didn’t bring a fire truck out onto the ice to put out the fire. The simple answer is they couldn’t because they didn’t have anything except a fire extinguisher someone had brought, he said.
“We had people climbing onto the wings trying to put it out,” he said. “We did everything we could. There’s nothing that could have been done.”
Chief Rita Thompson said the community is doing better now that they know the remains of the passengers, taken to southern Ontario for autopsy purposes, will be flown back to the community from Toronto in two weeks, allowing for proper funerals to be staged in North Spirit Lake.
She's worried it could happen again.
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Thompson said their runway lacks a lot of the essential safety gear most airports take for granted. One of the key changes the community wants implemented is a system that lets pilots know what the weather conditions are. Most of the time, the pilots get their information from Winnipeg, which though only a couple of hours away through the air, doesn’t have the same weather as North Spirit Lake, she said.
“We need a proper person who is going to tell them what kind of weather it is up here,” she said, still in shock over the crash. “This is too early for us too. This is quite a big shock for us. We still haven’t thought that hard ahead for training, but we will be. Just right now, we’re in shock.”
Unlike most fly-in communities, North Spirit Lake also doesn’t have a beacon to guide pilots in poor weather.
Deputy Chief Cameron Rae said they have been asking for a beacon for more than 15 years.
Rae said he hopes more safety measures can be put in place to prevent such tragedies from happening again.
Tbnewswatch.com reporter Jeff Labine is currently touring several Nishnawbe-Aski Nation First Nation communities across the region. More stories collected during his tour will be published in the coming days.
