INSIDE: Numerous weather records broken during hot, dry July Pg. 4 August 6, 2010
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Local tattoo artist ‘life casts’ 22 does 1985-
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LOCAL NEWS, SPORTS, WEATHER & ENTERTAINMENT chilliwacktimes.com
Fisherman drowns in Chilliwack River Search and Rescue urges caution on and around water BY TYLER OLSEN tolsen@chilliwacktimes.com
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save him because the room was on fire already.” Still shouting, the diminutive Pitre—she stands just four-foot11—entered the other bedroom and helped its resident, a man, t ow a rd s a n d u p t h e s t a i r s, foregoing the slower chair-lift normally used. Back upstairs, Pitre called 911 and then continued to rouse occupants on the second and third floors. One lady who had taken medication
Chilliwack Search and Rescue manager is warning people to be careful around the area’s rivers after his members pulled a drowned fisherman from the Chilliwack River Wednesday. The man had been fishing near the mouth of the Chilliwack River at Chilliwack Lake when his hip waders began filling with water. As the water began to sweep him away, people closer to the shore attempted to drag the man to safety, but the current wrenched him from their grasp and down EB IRST the river. Search and Rescue First reported on members received a chilliwacktimes.com call shortly thereafter, and an intensive search was launched with the help of a helicopter. Unfortunately, about four hours after the man was last seen, his body was found under a log, still near the mouth of the river. Chilliwack Search and Rescue search manager Dan McAuliffe said the incident isn’t the first time a local fisherman has been dragged into a river by his hip waders. In this case, he said the fisherman “had on rubber hip waders which, if you don’t get out of the way, they fill up instantly and you’re gone.” He said it’s “virtually impossible” to get the waders off in the water. Some fishermen take a belt and cinch the waders up very tight at the top. That gives them an extra minute or two if something bad happens. But otherwise,
See FIRE, page 7
See DROWNING, page 5
Tyler Olsen/TIMES
Stella Pitre helped save 11 men and women from a fire in an assisted-living residence last Sunday.
The sound she dreaded
BY TYLER OLSEN tolsen@chilliwacktimes.com
t was the sound Stella Pitre had been dreading. At around 1:30 a.m. Sunday morning, a smoke alarm at the Kenswood Drive assisted-living residence where Pitre worked let out a terrifying shriek. Shortly before, Pitre— Cottonwood Cottage’s lone weekend staffer—had opened the door to a man’s first-floor room and smelled cigarette smoke. She told him he couldn’t smoke in the room, an order she says the resident regularly refused even though he also used a ventilator that fed him pure oxygen. Pitre says the management had issued
Smoke alarm at assisted-living facility jolts lone staffer into action, saving residents’ lives
the man an eviction notice for the end of August, but that would turn out to be too late for the man, for Pitre, and for the 11 other residents, some of whom suffer from dementia. When the alarm let out its first wail, Pitre, herself 62, leapt from her bed in the home’s office. She told the 84-year-old woman in a neighbouring room to wait outside and turned towards the stairs, up which smoke was billowing. Grabbing a wet towel and
placing it over her mouth—a procedure she says she learned from T V—Pitre descended, screaming at the top of her lungs to wake the two first-floor residents. To Pitre, the fire seemed to have begun in the smoker’s bedroom, a fact later confirmed by the Chilliwack fire department, which also confirmed “smoking materials” as the fire’s cause. “I go in and I scream and scream and scream,” says Pitre in her Acadian accent. “I could not
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