Passengers, witnesses describe crash that injured 29
First responders take 29 people to hospital as icy conditions create highway pileup
Every month, Vancouver resident Jordan Kawchuk travels to Kelowna to spend a few days with his two daughters who live there with their mother.
On Sunday, he was enjoying lunch in downtown Kelowna with his girls and preparing to say goodbye when he began to feel uneasy about the weather. Snow had been falling heavily and temperatures hovered around zero.
“It was pouring snow, alarming snow,” said Kawchuk. “If I could go back a day, I would have stayed the night.”
Around 8 p.m. on Sunday, while travelling on the Coquihalla Highway, the Greyhound bus in which Kawchuk was a passenger became involved in a multi-vehicle crash. One other bus was also involved, along with at least two tractor-trailer units and a number of smaller passenger vehicles.
The resulting accident, just south of the Othello Road exit, shut down the highway between Hope and Merritt for hours and sent 29 people to hospital in conditions ranging from stable to critical. Another 136 uninjured passengers were taken to a nearby warming centre at Hope Secondary School.
Kawchuk told Postmedia News on Monday that he was half-asleep listening to a podcast when he was jolted awake.
“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, adding that he was “petrified.” “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 sequence of events that led to the pileup remained unclear Monday morning, said B.C. RCMP Traffic Services spokesman Const. Mike Halskov.
“I’m of the understanding that it was an extremely chaotic scene last night because of the number and size of the vehicles involved and the number of people that were involved, so they’re trying to put that together as far as what happened to start this chain-reaction type of collision,” said Halskov. “It’s going to be a matter for Fraser Valley Traffic Services to figure out as the investigating agency.”
Graham Zillwood, who lives next to the stretch of highway where the accident occurred, said it was about 8 p.m. that he heard the “familiar sound” of a vehicle going off the highway.
“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.
The Coquihalla River separates his home from the highway, but Zillwood said he had a clear view of what happened from his front window.
“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,’’ he said.
Halskov didn’t have a specific number of vehicles involved, and there are different accounts from different responding agencies. B.C. Emergency Health Services said the crash involved at least two transport trucks, two buses and two smaller vehicles. Hope Search and Rescue described a scene with three buses, four semis and 17 cars. Chilliwack Search and Rescue manager Dan McAuliffe said he counted up to seven tractor-trailers, two buses and at least four vehicles. Greyhound confirmed that two of its buses were involved in the incident.
One bus, which was en route to Vancouver from Kelowna, had 50 customers on board, plus a driver. The other bus, which slid down an embankment and ended up on its side, had 47 customers on board, plus the driver. It was also travelling from Kelowna to Vancouver.
Halskov said a couple of vehicles went over an embankment and there was a concern that people could have been ejected, so a search was conducted to make sure that everyone was located.
The Hope Fire Department had “all hands on deck” to help extricate people from the buses and tractor-trailers involved in the crash. Chief Tom DeSorcy said there were nine firefighters and two trucks on scene, and firefighters provided ladders, held up windows and helped people climb the embankment to the road.
“It was ... quite a chaotic scene,” DeSorcy said. Firefighters had trouble getting to the scene because of the “terrible, icy conditions.”
DeSorcy himself was at the warming centre, where paramedics and a doctor checked out people involved in the crash, and put bus passengers on replacement buses.
“People were shaken, and it was traumatic,” DeSorcy said. “I can only imagine what it was like to be on a bus that goes over the side and you’re on your side and having other vehicles crashing in behind you.”
Kawchuk estimates it was about a 12-foot climb via ladder from the bus’s emergency exit to the snow-covered ground. He escaped with a sore back and neck, and was quickly ushered onto a shuttle that took him to the warming centre.