‘You close your eyes and you still see the accident’
Myles Shumlanski was at home on his Tisdale acreage just before 5 p.m. Friday, winding down after the work week, when he looked out his window and saw the bus carrying his son Nick and the rest of the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey squad roll by. “There goes the boys,” Shumlanski remembers saying to his wife Vivian, who was getting ready for a family outing to the arena to watch the Broncos’ playoff match in Nipawin, Sask., about 20 kilometres to the north.
Minutes later, Shumlanski’s phone rang. Nick, 20, was on the line, and he was hysterical. “The bus was in an accident,” he screamed into the phone.
What should have been a roughly two-hour trip northeast from Humboldt, Sask. had come to crashing halt at a highway intersection just half a kilometre from Shumlanski’s home.
He and his wife jumped into their car and rushed to the scene. He imagined they would find the bus had rolled into the ditch, but they arrived to find the bus mangled and all but unrecognizable, its roof nearly ripped off by a collision with a semi. The truck’s freight of peat moss was scattered across the highway and fields. Moans filled the air. The bus’s passengers were covered in blood.
“As soon as I came,” Shumlanski said. “I knew that it was a disaster.”
Nick ran over to him, one of only two passengers who seemed to be mobile. Some were pinned under debris. Most couldn’t move. Everyone was in a state of shock.
Shumlanski put his son in the car and along with passing motorists who’d stopped, went to work helping victims. “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. ... They were in very bad shape.” Of the 29 people on board the bus, 15 were killed — 10 players, the driver, two coaches, a volunteer statistician and a broadcaster.
That Friday afternoon had begun like so many others for the young men on the Humboldt Broncos, although the usual game-day jitters were likely increased a notch. The pride of the farming town, located about 100 kilometres east of Saskatoon, the Broncos were facing elimination, down three games to one in their best-of-seven Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League semifinal. Two nights earlier, the Nipawin Hawks had come back from a 5-3 deficit to beat the Broncos in triple overtime.
Tim Klimosko, who was an assistant coach of the Broncos from 2005 to 2012, said the Elgar Petersen Arena and the Broncos that called it home were the undeniable focal point of the town of 5,869 souls.
“You schedule your whole week around when the Broncos games are. That’s how huge it is,” Klimosko said. “I know it’s funny maybe for you, but not for this small town.”
His son, Brayden Klimosko, who took over as assistant coach from 20132017 and played on the team from 2006-2008, described the team Sunday as the “Green Bay Packers of junior hockey.”
“People know who the players are. If you’re going to grab a coffee at Tim’s the fans will come up and say, ‘Hey, good game,’ or ‘Way to go, keep it up.’
“They’re rootin’ for their boys. They never get down on them.”
The coaching staff has always had an open-door philosophy toward the community, he added. It’s not unusual to find local residents having coffee with the coaches, trying to get the latest scoop on who’s being traded or who the team’s next goalie will be. Before games the team can often be found having a pregame meal at Johnny’s Bistro, a go-to spot where players get 50-per-cent discounts on their meals.
When the Broncos play at home, sheer pandemonium typically breaks out in the arena, residents said. In recent years, some fans have taken to ripping off their shirts and twirling them around during games.
“Just your typical hicktown Saskatchewan type of thing to do,” Brayden Klimosko said.
Drive down Main Street and storefronts are festooned with the team’s green and yellow colours, and billboards remind the people of Humboldt when there’s a game happening that night. The Danish Oven bakery serves up green doughnuts. Even the town’s fire hydrants are painted with Broncos jerseys. And the players don’t hesitate to give back to the community, reading books to school children or volunteering to spend time with people with special needs.
This past year, for the first time in a while, the team — wearing their signature jerseys — went and visited Elgar Petersen himself, the local sports legend after whom the arena is named. Petersen, 82 and now living in a care home, served as the team’s trainer and equipment manager when it was founded in 1970.
“If you put the word out that you need the Broncos to help out at a pancake breakfast they’ll come help out,” said Judy Plag, general manager of the town’s Bella Vista Inn hotel.
On Sunday, an emotional Broncos president Kevin Garinger described the philosophy of head coach and general manager, Darcy Haugan, who was killed in the crash. “The Humboldt Broncos were not about building hockey players but creating amazing young men,” Garinger said. “That’s what we had in our organization — was amazing young men. That was Darcy’s belief and that through that process, they would ultimately become great hockey players too.”
Bus rides are a part of hockey life on the Prairies, and in some ways the bus was the heart of the Broncos team. After a win, the atmosphere on the team bus would be electric, but just as often the long rides down the rural highways were an occasion for teammates to unwind, to bond over games of cards and kill time listening to music or watching movies.
Some might put on their headphones and chill to music. Others might play a round of cards. Sometimes, Brayden Klimosko recalled of his time on junior hockey buses, a player would take the microphone and tell jokes over the intercom or break out into song. Or the team might throw on a “classic” movie like Dumb and Dumber or Happy Gilmore to get a few chuckles. “The bus was always a safe place for us,” he said.
The bus may have always seemed safe, but the back roads could be treacherous. In 1986, the bus carrying the Swift Current Broncos hit black ice on a trip to Regina and skidded off the road, killing four players.
And if the Humboldt Broncos had been looking out the right-side window in the seconds before Friday’s crash as their bus drove north on Highway 35, they would have seen a cluster of white wooden crosses, memorializing six members of the Fiddler family, killed at the same intersection in June 1997.
Dylan Fiddler, who was six at the time of the accident that killed his mother, aunt, uncle and three young cousins, remembers closing his eyes every time his team bus crossed the intersection when he was playing junior hockey in his teens.
Now 27, Fiddler said Sunday how hard it is to believe the Bronco crash occurred in the same spot where his mother and family were killed. “This is just so tragic. I’m not saying what happened with my family wasn’t, but that was just one family that was affected. This is 15 families, an entire hockey community. It’s so devastating.”
PEOPLE ARE BRINGING FOOD ... WE’VE GOT MULTINATIONAL COMPANIES HELPING US, WE’VE GOT NATIONAL COMPANIES OFFERING STUFF. THE SUPPORT IS OVERWHELMING AND TRULY APPRECIATED.
— ROB EICHORST, HUMBOLDT BRONCOS GOVERNOR
An RCMP news release issued after the collision reported the basic facts: that officers from their Nipawin detachment responded at about 5 p.m. Friday “to a collision between the Humboldt Broncos’ bus and a tractor trailer unit.” Their investigation determined that the truck was travelling west on Highway 335 and the bus was travelling north on Highway 35. Traffic on Highway 35 has the rightof-way at the intersection, with vehicles on Highway 335 meeting stop signs in both directions. There were 29 people on the bus at the time of the collision, 15 of whom died with the remainder being sent to hospital with a variety of injuries. The driver, and lone occupant of the tractor trailer, was not injured.
He was briefly detained “as part of the process of the investigation,” Curtis Zablocki, assistant commissioner for the Saskatchewan RCMP, said later. He was then released and given “mental health and wellness assistance.” With an investigation looking at all the factors — road conditions, weather, the vehicles and their drivers — it’s too early to tell what went wrong, Zablocki said. “This work will take some time.” Some 50 RCMP officers had been on the scene, he said, a response unprecedented in the history of Saskatchewan.
But while the cause of the crash may take time to unravel, the horrific impact was only too obvious to the first responders arriving on the scene.
Jessica Brost got the call from dispatch just before 5 p.m. on Friday, as she was on her way to pick up her kids from daycare: semi versus passenger van, possibly 35 patients, some entrapment and some fatalities. Her first thought was that she hoped they’d gotten the numbers wrong, that somebody was being dramatic.
Brost, who has worked in emergency medical services for 13 years and as a paramedic for nine, had taken over as owner of Northeast EMS, a private ambulance service in Nipawin, less than a week earlier. When she got the call, she thought immediately of the hockey team from Humboldt that was headed to Nipawin to play the Hawks that night. There is no public bus service in that area, and it was Easter break, so the school buses weren’t running. “I knew it was them immediately, the hockey team,” she said.
When she started putting out calls to her co-workers about the accident, none immediately believed her when she told them what had happened. “It was actually hard for people to compute,” she said.
When she arrived on the scene, firefighters had shored up what remained of the bus and some were underneath, pulling out passengers. She said the extent of the damage made it “almost unrecognizable as to which vehicle was which.”
“The bus was on its side and there were pieces of the bus that were strewn all over, and we were all in there trying to treat the patients that we could,” said Lyle Moffatt. The former owner of Northeast EMS, Moffatt had retired on April 1 after a career as a paramedic that spanned more than three decades. On Friday he came out of retirement to help the other first responders at the site of the crash — a scene he described as “organized chaos.”
All told, Brost thinks there were about 100 first responders at the scene of the crash on Friday evening, including ambulance crews and firefighters from Nipawin, Melfort, Tisdale and Zenon Park.
“Everybody had a job to do,” he said. “They did it at the highest level of professionalism that I’ve seen.”
First responders have a triage tag system, Brost explained, placing green and yellow tags on patients in less serious condition, red tags on those in critical condition and black on those who had died. Almost everyone at this scene, she said, was tagged either red or black.
A few passengers had managed to walk from the bus to emergency vehicles, including one young man who thought his legs were broken. “I don’t know how he walked,” she said.
The cold added to the challenge. Someone was handing out blankets to help keep the victims warm. Several parents were on the scene as well — one father ferried two of the injured players to a local hospital, while another helped the paramedics identify patients and gather information about allergies and medical histories. “It was just an unbelievable effort,” she said.
Brost sent the most critical patients to the hospital in Nipawin, while some of the others went to the smaller hospital in Tisdale. She ended up riding with the last living passenger pulled from the wreckage, a young man who had been unconscious for about an hour before first responders were able to extricate him.
In her years of experience, Brost had never seen anything like it. Neither had Moffatt. “In 32 years, it’s the worst that I’ve ever seen,” he said. “You close your eyes and you still see the accident and that’s something we’re going to have to deal with for a long time.”
John Froh, the medical director for the Shock Trauma Air Rescue Service (STARS) air ambulance and an emergency physician in Saskatoon, was taking his daughter to the gym to play basketball when he heard about the crash. He swung into a co-ordination role for STARS, trying to get details on the crash and what kind of air ambulance response was needed.
It soon became clear they needed the biggest response possible.
Jon Witt, another emergency physician and transport physician for STARS, was sitting down for dinner with friends when Froh handed off the task of coordinating the service’s response while Froh himself flew out on one of the helicopters. That meant figuring out how many aircraft they would need, how many hospitals would have to be involved and co-ordinating with the Saskatchewan Health Authority to prepare for the influx of patients, with doctors, nurses and support staff all needed.
“When we speak about it now it seems linear, but in real time it’s very fluid,” Froh said.
Froh flew to Tisdale Hospital to assess things on the ground, while another STARS co-ordinator was at the Nipawin Hospital. The total air ambulance response would end up being three STARS helicopters, two Saskatchewan air ambulance planes, one air ambulance plane from TransWest Air and two air ambulance planes from Alberta.
Planes and helicopters were flying in from all over, physicians were coming in from surrounding communities and people were stopping on the highway to help.
“Everybody was pulling together as individuals, as communities and as healthcare partners,” Witt said.
Meanwhile at Saskatoon’s Royal University Hospital, a Code Orange was declared in anticipation of mass casualties. The Saskatoon hospital was the closest major trauma centre to the accident scene, and patients would soon be sent there by air ambulance from Nipawin and Tisdale.
As the scale of the disaster became apparent, physicians phoned in to see if they could help and nurses drove in to the Royal University from other towns. On what would normally have been a quiet Friday night, the hospital “became like an active factory,” critical care physician Hassan Masri said.
For the trauma teams moving from one patient to the next, it was all a bit of a blur. “We started receiving patients around 9 or 10 p.m. I remember looking at my phone at one point to see what time it was, and it was already six in the morning,” Masri said.
It was after all the victims who could be saved had been stabilized, Masri said, that the emotional impact hit. For him, the trigger was seeing on a news site a photograph taken in his hospital of three surviving teammates clasping each other’s hands as they lay side-by-side on beds.
“That image is engraved in my head for maybe 50 years to come,” he said. In a Facebook post, he spoke of the “cruelty” of the crash. And he had a special word of thanks to the nurses in the emergency department and intensive care unit. “Your tears made it easier for my tears to flow,” he wrote.
At the hospital in Nipawin, Brost said, it was all hands on deck. All servi- ces that would normally be closed on a Friday evening were open, from the cafeteria to the pharmacy, and there was a doctor and multiple nurses in every room. While the survivors were stabilized, the paramedics worked to clean out their ambulances, and then ferried the patients from the hospital to the airport to be flown to Saskatoon. The last patient was moved out at about 12:30 a.m., she said.
By 3:30 a.m., Brost’s work was finished. She went home and began, finally, to process what she’d seen. She couldn’t sleep, nor could most of her colleagues. “Your mind wouldn’t let you rest,” she said.
On Saturday, Brost and her crew were on call, though the day was quiet. They gathered together, going “over and over and over the events,” she said. They read about the passengers who had died as information started to come out in the news. They looked at photos of the players, with their playoff beards and bleach-blond hair. They were struck by the aerial shots of the crash site, she said. “Even though we were right there in the thick of it, it really took us back.”
In Humboldt, trying to come to grips with the loss, a hush has swept over the entire community. “It’s very quiet. We’re still a community in shock,” said Plag, the hotel manager.
But she said residents are finding comfort in the overwhelming support they’ve received from near and far. A group of hunters from South Carolina who have stayed at her hotel even called her up over the weekend offering to donate money.
Meanwhile, Plag is doing what she can by offering up complimentary rooms to family and friends of the victims. “Hockey’s been put to the side. And now we need to help them, right? There’s no hesitation,” she said.
Nick Shumlanski was one of the lucky ones. He was taken to Saskatoon for additional treatment, and a scan revealed some broken bones, but he was released at 6 a.m. Saturday. Doctors said he would be able to play hockey again. “He’s actually a miracle,” his father remembers a doctor saying.
IT JUST KEEPS HITTING ME IN WAVES. I GO FROM ‘WOW I JUST CAN’T BELIEVE THIS IS HAPPENING’ TO THEN JUST GOING NUMB.
— JORDAN BOGRESS, 18, OF DELTA, B.C., WHO PLAYED WITH THE HUMBOLDT BRONCOS FOR THREE MONTHS LAST FALL
‘The bus was on its side and there were pieces of the bus that were strewn all over, and we were all in there trying to treat the patients that we could’