MONTREAL - A coroner's inquest is trying to determine exactly what caused a deadly fire, and what lessons can be learned.

A fire that killed university student Emmanuelle Leclerc, 21, and Selam Fantaye, 26 on March 2 in an apartment building on Van Horne in Cote-des-Neiges could be the fault of a computer glitch.

Just before 2 a.m. on March 2, 2011 a fire broke out in the basement of a three-storey building at 2500 Van Horne, near Hillsdale St.

Clouds of smoke billowed through the building, but due to a series of mishaps two people died and nine more were so overcome by smoke they had to be hospitalized.

The inquiry is trying to figure out what went wrong the night of the fire, and so far the coroner has learned that despite the building having an advanced alarm system with smoke and heat detectors, no alarms sounded the night of the fire.

Firefighters had already determined that an electrical fault in the basement sparked the fire.

But the mishaps were not confined to the building.

Because of a computer error, the firefighters at the nearest station were not dispatched when the first 911 calls came in. Instead crews from another station were sent out, and it's estimated that they arrived minutes later than the nearest crew could have arrived at the fire.

Several occupants said the morning after the fire that they heard alarms go off, but that they stopped after a few seconds.

At the inquest on Thursday, one woman who lived on the second floor said she and her roommates decided to get out after hearing that brief blast of alarms, but that the smoke in the stairwells was very thick.

One woman continued down through the smoke in a decision that proved fatal. She died of smoke inhalation.

Another woman went back up to the apartment and jumped off the second floor, which ended up saving her life.

Nicola Lessey managed to get out of the fire with her two children. She believed that Fantaye was close behind but was puzzled when she did not appear outside, which has kept her troubled her snce.

"I live with it every day of my life," said Lessey. "I was the last person to see her."

"You don't know how it feels to be at your last breath. I really struggled out of the building and at that moment, in being with the inhalation. I thought I was going to die," said Lessey.