Judy Waditaka-Crowe says she is very worried someone will get hurt if something isn’t done to clean up the trailer court where she lives.
Waditaka-Crowe was sleeping in her North Bay Trailer Park home on Tuesday morning when a fire started at the vacant trailer next door. She told paNOW she was awoken by the sound of her grandchild calling out to her.
“Kokum, it’s getting bigger [the child said], so I jumped out of bed and sure enough [the trailer] was all in flames,” she said.
Neighbours came rushing to help, and Waditaka-Crowe claimed someone saw a car speed off.
“We have no light out here so they couldn’t figure out the colour,” she said.
The Buckland Fire Department arrived at the trailer park north of Prince Albert around 2:30 a.m. and was there for about five hours. Meanwhile, Waditaka-Crowe and her grandchildren were instructed by police to evacuate their trailer.
“We went around the trailer and sat on the lawn there, my four grandkids, for one hour,” she said. “And they were just tired and scared.”
Fortunately, Waditaka-Crowe and her family were not physically hurt, but the heat from the fire did crack several windows on her trailer.
Last summer, a number of residents in the trailer park were issued eviction notices after attempts by the previous owner to solve an issue with the sewage lagoon failed. Despite the property being sold, a number of people still left, leaving many empty trailers.
Waditaka-Crowe estimated the trailer next door to hers has been vacant for about a year. She said the previous owners appeared to have been in a hurry when they departed and left metal and other garbage strewed around the lot. Waditka-Crowe said the landlord assured her two months ago that a crew was going to come and bulldoze the empty trailers and clean up the lots.
“And I knew something like this was going to happen, and you can see the neighbouring kids come around here and play, like they get in here and get hurt,” she said.
A spokesperson for the Buckland Fire Dept. informed paNOW the cause of Tuesday’s fire remains under investigation.
Neither the owner nor the caretaker of the trailer park could be reached for comment.
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nigel.maxwell@jpbg.ca
On Twitter: @nigelmaxwell
