700 military members without heat or hot water at CFB Petawawa due to PSAC strike

About 700 military members living on base at CFB Petawawa are without heat or hot water after some federal workers were deemed non-essential during the Public Service Alliance of Canada strike.

In total, 21 buildings that house members on site are without the amenities.

"The majority of buildings on base, we did lose heat and hot water," Acting Commander Andrew Mills told CTV News. "And currently that applies to the approximately 700 members that we have living here on base."

The heat went out Wednesday morning when 505 public service workers walked off the job, including those who keep the heat on at the on-base central heating plant.

"We do have members that are in a legal strike position that are not available to come into work, that are required in order to ensure the safety of the operation of the plant," said Mills.

Mills tells CTV News that the decision on which employees are deemed essential or not is made at a national level.

"The workers at the plant were not deemed as essential workers and they're out on the picket line just like everybody else," said Randy Phinney, president of the Local 629 Union of National Defence Employees, located in Petawawa.

"I am very surprised that they weren't deemed essential," said Phinney, who was walking the picket line at the entrance to Garrison Petawawa Thursday.

"Once again, it's out of our hands. We don't make that decision."

The base says some newer buildings on site do still have amenities that will be available for shared use, such as showering.

"We do have a number of buildings here on base that still have their own integral heat and hot water. What we have done is we have made those facilities accessible," said Mills.

Mills adds that the members affected on base perform a variety of tasks and functions, and that no surround residential homes will be affected by the outage.

"All of the people that live here on base are single members. So they're not living here with their families. All of our residential housing units where our families are housed, they are unaffected by any of the amenity shortages."

Mills says the heat and hot water outage will remain until the public service strike ends.

About 155,000 public servants across Canada walked off the job Wednesday morning. PSAC, Canada's largest public sector union, is calling the strike one of the largest in Canadian history.