May 17 – Ely and Babbitt firefighters were paged out around 1:30 this afternoon to a roof fire at the Ely-Bloomenson Hospital. The incident was reported around 1:30 when the hospital’s maintenance staff spotted the fire. The hospital’s emergency operations plan was quickly put into action, resulting in the evacuation of non-critical employees. Essential operations remained intact during the incident and no patients at the hospital and adjacent skilled nursing facility were evacuated. Ely firefighters confined the fire to an area around an auxiliary generator exhaust stack, Sixteen Ely firefighters responded with a ladder truck, engine, and a rapid response engine. The Babbitt Fire Department was cancelled while enroute. The cause of the fire was linked to insulation around the generator stack. The auxiliary generator was undergoing a routine test just before the fire was discovered.
