National Post (National Edition)
CRASH in Saskatchewan: ‘I thought I was DEAD’
ALL ON BOARD SURVIVE ‘TERRIFYING’ PLUNGE IN TURBOPROP
FOND-DU-LAC, SASK. •Moments after the plane he was on took off, 15-year-old Lyman Fern felt it rocking back and forth, and knew something was terribly wrong.
“On the fourth time, it just went down and the engines cut off, too. It was just dark on the plane,” he said.
“I just closed my eyes. I didn’t know what to do. I never even got knocked out.”
When he opened his eyes, he was lying on a bunch of branches, as his seatbelt had come off and he wasn’t in his seat.
“Once I looked around at everything, for a second, I thought I was dead,” he said, as the plane was quiet and dark.
“The plane was just moving up and down, side by side,” said Willie John Laurent, a band councillor with the Fond du Lac Dene Nation who was also on the plane. “The last I remember is it touching the ground. That’s the last I know.”
Laurent, his wife Helen and their daughter Amanda were among the 22 passengers — including an infant — and three crew aboard the West Wind Aviation turboprop that crashed Wednesday around 6:15 p.m. in the boreal forest of far northern Saskatchewan. It was scheduled to travel 80 kilometres east to Stony Rapids, then on to Wollaston and Prince Albert.
With cuts on his hands, a gash on his head and a headache, Fern said he’s grateful to be alive. He was checked out at a nearby clinic and the nurses told him he was OK.
“If you really think that there’s someone out there, there really is a higher power,” he said.
Darryl McDonald said his 70-year-old mother, Ernestine, suffered a broken jaw and facial injuries when the plane went down about a kilometre from the airstrip. His sister also suffered injuries to her leg.
Laurent, who was bruised on one side of his body, remembers hearing screaming as the plane went down.
“People yelling, yelling, yelling,” he said. “Then you smell a lot of fuel … Good thing there was no spark.”
A photo of the crash site shows the damaged aircraft partly on its side in the trees, with a wing jutting up in the air at a 45-degree angle. The cause of the crash isn’t known yet.
Ivan Adam was the first person to arrive at the scene. A Northern Ranger, he heard the crash from his house and sprang into action, driving his Ski-Doo to the crash site.
“I just said, ‘Oh my God. I hope there’s survivors’,” he said.
“All I just said was ‘hello?’ and as soon as I said that, there were people asking for ‘Help! Help’!”
Adam said he went to get help and asked someone to post on Facebook that there was a plane crash, there were survivors and that people needed help right away.
“About five, 10 minutes later, there were people already coming in with blankets and everything,” Adam said. “So we were hauling people back and forth,” he said, using the flashlight on his phone, as the leaking fuel made using a match or lighter dangerous.
Within an hour and a half, Adam said rescuers were able to get most of the people out, but he said some passengers took longer to remove than others, as one boy required a loader to be removed.
On Thursday morning, Rick Philipenko of West Wind Aviation said the cause of the crash was unknown.
“West wind Aviation prides itself on its safety record and we’ll continue to be relentless with regards to that being a primary objective of West Wind. This has probably been as severe a accident as we’ve had,” he said.
All 25 survivors got medical care in Fond-du-Lac and Stony Rapids, with five who were more seriously hurt transported to larger facilities, Philipenko said.
Fond-du-Lac Band Councillor Ronnie Augier said the entire community was shaken by the crash.
“We never expected (something like this) and no one was prepared for this sort of event. It was something really, really terrifying. Horrifying and something shocking for the whole community,” he said.
Fond-du-Lac Chief Louis Mercredi said all members of his community have been shaken by the crash.
“A lot of them are traumatized with the accident that happened, we never experienced anything like this, ever,” he said.
Mercredi said he’s heard from band members who were in Prince Albert for medical procedures who are now afraid to fly home.
“They’re just as traumatized as everyone else back home,” he said. “They don’t want to leave. We’ve got to get my people home somehow. We are in desperate need for an all-season road.”
Transportation Safety Board operations investigator David Ross said two investigators are on site and more will arrive soon.
I JUST SAID, ‘OH MY GOD. I HOPE THERE’S SURVIVORS.’