MONTREAL - Montreal police confirmed Friday afternoon that a second person has died as a result of the Van Horne Ave. fire very early Wednesday morning.

A 21-year-old woman died later that same day, and Friday afternoon a 26-year-old woman who had been in critical condition since the fire died in hospital.

Both women were in cardiac arrest when firefighters arrived at the scene at 2500 Van Horne Ave. at around 2 a.m. Wednesday morning to combat an electrical fire that began in the basement.

Two children aged 7 and 13 were in critical condition because of smoke inhalation, but their status was upgraded to stable by late Wednesday afternoon. They remain in hospital in stable condition.

Two people were treated at the scene of the fire but did not need further care.

Fire inspectors found that there were no working smoke detectors in the 17-unit apartment building that housed about 40 people, and had they been present it is highly likely everyone would have been able to leave the building before the smoke became overwhelming.

That day, fire inspectors did a sweep of that area of Cote des Neiges and found that about 70 per cent of the houses they visited did not have working smoke detectors either.

Now, questions are being raised about the fire department's response time to the fire.

An error resulted in a unit from the downtown station at the Palais des Congres being dispatched to the fire and cancelling a dispatch call to the nearby Cote des Neiges fire station, said Gordon Routley, a fire prevention chief with the Montreal fire department.

"The computer indicated that the downtown units would get there faster," Routley says. "So they unfortunately cancelled the closer units and then over the next 90 seconds to two minutes they realized what was wrong and then re-dispatched the closer units."

The normal response time for the Cote des Neiges station would be five to six minutes, Routley said, but the downtown unit took 10 minutes to arrive. Still, the fire department estimates the error caused no more than a two-minute delay.

But that is an eternity in a situation like this one, said Perry Bisson of the firefighters' association.

"Every second counts when you're fighting a fire," he said. "Every minute, the fire doubles in intensity."

The confusion was caused by two 9-1-1 calls coming in 20 seconds apart, with one call leading to the dispatch of the downtown unit and the other call triggering a dispatch of two Cote des Neiges units.

Routley said that whenever there is a fatality at a fire the department goes over the response time in great detail, which is why they spotted the error on the dispatch record. He said the data is being examined to determine if this was a case of human error or a computer glitch, but the firefighters' union wants the investigation to be done by the public security minister's office.

Routley stressed that the more critical error here was the lack of smoke detectors in the building.