No rural B.C. bus means few options
Ex-Greyhound driver shipped hospital supplies on now-closed routes
VANCOUVER— For a year, Amanda West was a link between communities in rural and northern B.C. As a former Greyhound bus driver, she helped to transport not only people, but vital health supplies to hospitals in rural communities.
“We deliver the blood and vaccines to all these different places across Canada,” West said. “It’s shipped as regular freight.”
She said blood was just one of a number of things Greyhound transported across the north.
“There’s a multitude of things that the buses carry,” she said. “I shipped bull semen once, which I found very funny, and boxes of baby chickens ... all sorts of interesting and wacky stuff.”
When West, who has driven the bus across the province “as far east as Revelstoke, and as far north as Kamloops” heard Greyhound would be shuttering all their routes in B.C.’s north and interior, she knew it would mean communities struggling for both transportation and vital health supplies.
Canadian Blood Services have confirmed they use the bus routes to deliver blood to remote communities, and do not yet have a plan in place once Greyhound ends service.
“At times we have used Greyhound as a transport option to deliver blood products to hospitals in these areas: Squamish, Whistler, Vernon, Grand Forks, Revelstoke,100 Mile House and Salmon Arm,” Marcelo Dominguez, communications specialist at the Canadian Blood Ser- vices, said in an email statement. “We are reviewing what the options are and will find other suitable carriers that maintain our current service levels moving forward.”
Eryn Collins, communications officer from Northern Health, also said that Greyhound was used as a shipping provider to move lab samples and other medical supplies, and that “we are working to identify alternatives.”
But while the health authorities will likely find a way to get these supplies to hospitals, West, who hails from Ashcroft, B.C., said that may not be the case for people seeking transportation in rural areas, who currently have no other options. Without it, she said, people simply will be stuck, with no options for getting out.
“There is no other reliable way to travel through the Fraser Canyon at all. If you live in Lytton or Hope, and you don’t have a car, there’s no way for you to get where you’re going,” she said, adding that Via Rail, which has some routes up north, is too expensive and unreliable for most people.
The main people West is worried about are seniors, such as her parents — at 85, they are close to the point in their lives where they are no longer be able to drive. She said that they have to travel an hour to get into Kamloops from Ashcroft to go to a doctor’s appointment.
“So if my dad decides he doesn’t want to drive any more their chances of getting to that doctor appointment is very limited, they’d have to depend on someone else to drive them ... that’s not necessarily going to happen,” said West. “That puts them at risk of not being able to see a specialist.”