‘BRACE YOURSELF’
HORRENDOUS B.C. MULTI-VEHICLE COLLISION SENDS 29 TO HOSPITAL
Jordan Kawchuk was half- asleep in his seat on a Greyhound bus, listening to a podcast when he was jolted awake at about 8 p.m. Sunday. The scene petrified him. “We found ourselves kind of precariously teetering on the edge of the road and I remember everyone standing up and screaming, ‘ Get to the right’ like you’re trying to right a boat,” he said.
“I think it was the bus driver that said over the Intercom, ‘ Brace yourself.’ There was this very long pause and — smash. It was the most incredible impact ever.”
The multi- vehicle collision on a notorious stretch of British Columbia’s Coquihalla Highway involved 165 people and sent 29 of them to hospital, some of them in critical condition.
The scene was so chaotic that emergency response workers had differing accounts of exactly how many vehicles were involved. B.C. Emergency Health Services said at least two transport trucks, two buses and two smaller vehicles were among the wreckage. Hope Search and Rescue described a scene with three buses, four semis and 17 cars. Meanwhile, Greyhound has conf i rmed two of its buses carrying 97 passengers were involved.
What set off the chainreaction was still unclear on Monday morning. “It’s going to be a matter for Fraser Valley Traffic Services to figure out as the investigating agency,” said B.C. RCMP Traffic Services spokesman Const. Mike Halskov.
“That would be classified as one of those 1,000- piece puzzles with really small pieces to put together.”
Graham Zillwood has witnessed numerous crashes outside his front window on that stretch of road that connects Vancouver and Kelowna, but nothing like Sunday night’s disaster.
The Coquihalla River separates his home from the highway, but Zillwood said he had a clear view of what happened. He heard the “familiar sound” of a vehicle going off the highway at about 8 p.m.
“I looked to my left and I could see a whole bunch of other vehicles stopped and I saw the first semi and I thought, ‘ Oh no, here we go again.’ So that semi hit a car on the road, knocked it down the embankment and then the semi rolled down the embankment on that car.”
A few seconds later, he said another semi- trailer truck speared the first and then a third truck nudged a Greyhound bus before it hit the second truck involved in the crash.
“I was on the phone to 911 as all this was happening. I was ( doing) play- by- play telling them what was happening kind of thing. I’ve done that before here, unfortunately. This happens more often than it should.”
The accident just south of the Othello Road exit, shut down the highway between Hope and Merritt for seven hours.
Hope Search and Rescue, numerous area fire departments and dozens of ambulances rushed to the scene to help. The Hope Secondary School opened its doors and became a warming centre for 136 uninjured travellers. There, paramedics and a doctor checked for injuries and put bus passengers on replacement buses.
Kawchuk estimates it was about a 12- foot climb via ladder from the bus’s emergency exit to the snowcovered ground. He escaped with a sore back and neck and was quickly ushered onto a shuttle that took him to the warming centre.
“It was bitter cold and snow and smoke ever ywhere,” he said, describing the countless uniformed first responders that seemed to rush toward the wreckage. “I r emember l ooking back and it was all just smoke and lights. It was very surreal.”
Investigators will have to identify everyone who was involved, determine whether they were injured and what vehicle they were riding in, and get statements to try to piece together the sequence of events.
“It was pretty brutal and thankfully there were no fatalities as a result — a number of injuries, to be sure, but given the circumstances, it’s very, very lucky that nobody passed away up there last night,” Halskov said.