Sask. homeowner battles SGI over using ‘damaged materials’ in fire rebuild

Editor’s Note: This is the first story in a two-part series. Part 2, focusing on the emotional and financial toll of the family’s 14-month dispute, will be published on Monday afternoon on 980 CJME and 650 CKOM.

Fourteen months ago, Sabrina Porter’s home in Pilot Butte caught on fire. And ever since, it’s sat without a roof, open to the elements through all four seasons as Porter fights with her insurance company.

In August 2025, a fire started in the neighbour’s backyard; when Porter looked outside, it was already burning their adjoining fence and was catching on her house.

She called it traumatic. Her husband was having major back and mobility issues, so he could barely get into a pair of pants and get out.

“For me, for probably I’d say the two weeks after, I had nightmares. I had moments of anxiety. We’d come here, and you’d have that sense again of ‘what if we don’t get out of the house?’”

The fire went up the west wall of their home and got into the roof.

Fire services arrived and attacked the flames, pumping hundreds of thousands of litres of water onto and into the house. They had to come back during the day as well to put out hot spots.

This is where Porter thinks she and her husband might have been naive. They had an excellent insurance policy with SGI, one that had been described to them as the “Cadillac” of insurance policies, which was carefully chosen by them for their carefully chosen home.

“We would be looking to have our home return to the same safety, the same integrity, the same quality that it was pre-loss,” she said.

However, dealing with the insurance has been nearly as much of an ordeal for the couple as the fire was.

The aftermath

A company was hired to come in and tear out all the damage and recover what they could from the house. But due to the rain in September 2025, the roof started to collapse, so the workers removed it.

In November, the workers also removed much of the burned west wall of the home.

This left the building with three and a half outside walls, no roof, and the inside stripped down to the studs and subfloor — all of it open to the elements.

Around this time, Porter, her husband and SGI started conversations about how to put everything back together.

Porter said SGI seemed to only pay attention to the fire damage and not what the huge volume of water in the house — and contamination from it — did to the integrity of the manufactured wood products like OSB, which are created using wood, compression and glue.

Framing in Sabrina Porter’s home in Pilot Butte still has char marks on it from the fire in August 2025. (Lisa Schick/980 CJME)

She said SGI wanted to put a roof on the structure, fix the wall and then start doing repairs inside, meaning doing a partial rebuild using much of the wood structure and framing that was still in the house and had been exposed to fire, water and the elements.

“We still had concerns about the viability of the structure, about the safety of it. And we also had concerns about mould and fungus and environmental factors,” Porter explained.

She has asthma, allergies and bronchiectasis.

Not only did SGI want to use charred wood that would be braced, Porter said it also wanted to keep the ductwork that was full of debris and soot, and keep whatever electrical it could.

Porter said she started having trouble getting responses from SGI, and they weren’t able to agree on a plan. She said SGI hasn’t been forthcoming with documents, either, explaining they had to go around SGI to get the mechanical inspection report.

In the meantime, Porter spoke with a structural technologist who confirmed her concerns about the partial rebuild.

That technologist attended a meeting with SGI and the insurance company’s engineer to explain what he found. Porter thought they had resolved some of the questions in that meeting, but SGI continued to only talk about a partial rebuild of the property.