(File photo)

By Nick Nielsen

One building unoccupied when fire started

Plane lands with one engine amid busy weekend fire calls

Aug 5, 2025 | 4:52 PM

The long weekend was a busy one for the Prince Albert Fire Department, with the first call coming at 1:30 a.m. on Friday, and the phone never stopped ringing.

One of the more unusual calls came from Prince Albert Airport after a twin engine plane that was trying to land reported that one of its engines was not working. While it may sound unusual, Deputy Fire Chief Alex Paul said that this actually happens once or twice a year.

“It’s routine practice. If an aircraft is coming in with any sort of mechanical issue, if they have a landing gear light not gone or not confirmed, or if they have an engine out or engine trouble, they’ll ask us to stand by just in case there’s a crash. Touch wood, 90 per cent of the time everything lands very, very safely, and I know the pilots are trained to operate a twin engine aircraft under an engine failure condition. So they managed to land it safely.”

The other call that came in that was a little out of the ordinary, was an apartment building fire that was visible from the roof of a building on the 1200 block of 28th Street East. What made the call unusual was no occupants were inside the building as it was going through renovations.

“Nobody should have been in there, but that fire is currently under investigation. The fire occurred in one of the top floor suites and burned through the roof,” he said.

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“It’s too early to say what the cause of the fire was, but there was nobody living in the building at the time of the fire.”

Aside from that, the rest of the calls the fire department responded to were fairly common occurrences from things like cooking mishaps to encampment fires. Even though they were significantly busy during the long weekend, there hasn’t been a trend of one type of call standing out as busier than normal.

“I don’t think that it’s anything unusual, but just based on the time of year, there’s more people out and about. We probably have some extra people in the city right now because of the upcoming Exhibition, so more people means call volume increases just a little bit.”

The City of Prince Albert still has a fire ban in effect for all areas within city limits on the north side of the North Saskatchewan River. So far, the fire department has not had any issues with anyone refusing to follow the fire ban regulations.

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nick.nielsen@pattisonmedia.com