Community tries in vain to rescue victims

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/01/2012 (5303 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THE blizzard was so bad you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.

But despite the whiteout, at least one person was waiting at the tiny terminal on the airstrip for the Keystone Air Service charter aircraft at 10 a.m.

A school worker had promised to pick up the daughter of one of the teachers due to arrive on that morning flight.

But the small plane with five souls aboard never made it as far as the landing strip.

The Piper crashed, instead, in a ball of fire on the frozen lake about half a kilometre away from the airstrip.

Within an hour, reports out of North Spirit Lake, Ont., 400 kilometres north of Kenora, confirmed fatalities.

Martha Campbell, the daughter of a local teacher, was the only fatality from North Spirit Lake.

Along with Campbell, the pilot of the aircraft died as well as two employees of Winnipeg-based Aboriginal Strategies Inc., owned by Tataskweyak Cree Nation.

Winnipeg resident Colette Eisingerwas in her late 30s with a teenage son and had joined Aboriginal Strategies just recently, said a close relative. “It’s just tragic. She was a wonderful person, beautiful. A nice sweet girl.”

The crash happened near the home of the airport’s foreman.

“They had snowmobiles. They went there right away but the fire was too much and they managed to get two out, one was the survivor and one other body,” one woman from the Cree community of about 300 said late Tuesday.

Witnesses described hearing the victims’ screams over the roar of the flames — and the fire that kept rescuers from saving them.

“It’s very sad… very sad,” said Cameron Rae, who ran a store that bears his name on the reserve. “We’ve known (the victims) for a long, long time.”

Rae said people from the home closest to the crash tried to put out flames that consumed the plane, throwing snow on it to fight the fire.

“They were doing whatever they could to save those people,” Rae said.

He said the weather was brutal as the crash occurred. It was a “blinding snowstorm… a whiteout,” Rae said.

Eric Feldman, principal of Victoria Linklater Memorial School in North Spirit Lake, said the remote First Nation had almost no resources to cope with the crash.

“There is no emergency equipment whatsoever here,” said Feldman. “There’s no firefighting equipment. Not even an ambulance.”

alexandra.paul@freeepress.mb.ca