L’ISLE-VERTE, Quebec — In the wintry days since a fire swept through the retirement home in this quaint, rambling village along the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, L’Isle-Verte has been overrun by police officers, firefighters, coroners and anthropologists, painstakingly chipping away at the layers of ice encasing the building and digging through the charred ruins.

When they finish, the death toll of the Jan. 23 fire at the home, Résidence du Havre, is expected to reach 32.

Nearly everyone in this town of 1,425 people has been affected in some way: the families of those who died; the police officers who arrived in the early morning hours and crawled down hallways to avoid smoke, dragging elderly residents out on their backs; the firefighters who doused the blaze with water, the spray instantly freezing in the minus-8-degree cold, entombing the bodies in more than two feet of ice.

For the province of Quebec, the tragedy evoked a particularly horrible sense of déjà vu. It came nearly seven months after a runaway oil train exploded into a fireball in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, killing 47 people in a town of 6,000 some 245 miles away.