FATHER RECOUNTS FRANTIC RESCUE EFFORT
Myles Shumlanski says rescuers crawled under bus to reach victims
It was about 5 p.m. Friday when Myles Shumlanski got a “hysterical” call from his son.
“The bus was in an accident,” his son, Humboldt Broncos player Nick Shumlanski, screamed into the phone.
Myles jumped into his vehicle and rushed to the crash site, about a quarter-mile from his home on a Tisdale-area acreage. He and his wife, Vivian, were the first, and to his knowledge only, family members on the scene of the tragedy that struck his son’s hockey team that day.
“As soon as I came,” he said, “I knew that it was a disaster.
“It was a pretty devastating sight.”
Nick came running over to him. He was one of only two kids who seemed able to walk. Some were stuck under debris, Myles said. Most couldn’t move. Everyone was in a state of shock.
Myles put Nick in the car and immediately went to work, along with passing motorists who’d stopped to help.
“It was chaos,” he said. They held the kids steady and did what they could while they waited for emergency workers to arrive.
“People were getting blankets. You were taking your jackets. You were doing anything to cover these boys,” he said. “They were in snow and ice and it was very cold yesterday. They were in very bad shape.”
He said the helpers had to crawl under parts of the bus on their stomachs to reach some of the victims. As they did, he saw things that deeply disturbed him.
“It was so sad.”
A minute felt like a day, Myles said. He surveyed the damage and saw a bus that was almost unrecognizable, its roof mostly torn off. He never even spotted the front of the bus, which seemed in “dire” shape.
He figured there were more kids stuck inside.
He said the first firefighters arrived around 5:20 p.m., though he admits his sense of time is hazy. Myles said he knew some of the volunteers at the Tisdale department.
“My boy was on this bus, oh my God,” he remembers calling out to them. “You guys need more help ... get more help.”
With the crash scene in good hands, he rushed Nick to the hospital in Tisdale. He saw other families start pouring in, including billet moms and dads from Humboldt. Vague, confused information was flying around.
“In the hospital you’d hear that this one passed away. You’d talk to a couple (of ) parents,” he said. “‘ We haven’t found where our boy is.’ If you didn’t know which hospital your boy was at and it was three hours later, you knew it was a problem.”
Nick needed to go to Saskatoon for further treatment, and Myles heard there’d be a flight. But kids in worse shape kept coming in. They took priority.
“There was a shortage of planes,” he said. “They had planes from Edmonton coming to move some of these kids”
Myles ended up accompanying his son in an ambulance to Saskatoon.
During that night and morning, he saw the Broncos supporting each other, as they learned who among their teammates didn’t make it.
“They broke down,” he said. “When you’re playing on a team like that, they ’re brothers. They ’re not teammates, they’re brothers.”
The doctors gave Nick a scan to make sure he didn’t have any head injuries. It turned out he had a chipped vertebra and an injured shoulder, but he was OK. At 6 a.m. Saturday he was released. They later learned that he will be able to play hockey again.
“He’s actually a miracle,” Myles remembers a doctor saying.
Myles was impressed to see how the community came together in a time of terrible tragedy and chaos. He said the people who struggled to help those boys “will never be the same.”
“Nobody wants to be a hero,” he said. “They were just doing what comes natural.”