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“There’s ice over everything – everything,” Lt. Brunet said. “It’s very slippery, that’s why all the people have to be careful when they’re working over there. We never know if we break a piece of ice, what is underneath.”

Yvan Charron, chief of L’Isle-Verte’s volunteer fire department, said the last three days have been hard on his men, some of whom have relatives among the missing.

“Nobody can ever be prepared for something like this,” he said.

Lt. Brunet said he never imagined when he was working last July at the scene of the Lac-Mégantic train derailment that killed 47 people that he would be faced with another tragedy on a similar scale.

“It’s the kind of scene nobody wants to see. It’s something very special like it was in Mégantic,” he said. “When Mégantic happened, I was in the police force for 36 years, and that was the worst scene I had ever seen. . . . We were not expecting another one like this.”

The Quebec coroner’s office has so far identified three of the victims recovered from the Résidence du Havre fire, and on Saturday it released the names of the first two: Juliette Saindon, 95 and Marie-Lauréat Dubé, 82.

Police downplayed a media report quoting an employee of the residence who said the fire began in the room of a resident who had earlier been stopped from going outside to smoke a cigarette.

The possibility the fire was started by someone smoking “is one hypothesis among many,” Lt. Lapointe said, and no single theory is being favoured over others at this point. Lt. Brunet said police are still interviewing witnesses and seeking amateur photos and videos for an indication of where the fire started.