A Sunshine Coast couple say they are lucky to be alive after surviving a collision on the Coquihalla Highway outside of Hope on Wednesday morning involving at least two dozen vehicles.
“It was a nightmare,” said Buddy Boyd of Gibsons. “It was carnage like I’ve never seen before.”
Boyd and his wife, Barb Hetherington, the former owners of Gibsons Recycling Depot, were travelling to Malakwa, where they have been working on a low-waste tiny home project, to ensure the newly-installed home was weatherproofed as an Arctic weather system pulled through B.C.
The couple were outside of Hope heading towards Kamloops when they encountered the sheer-ice conditions on a descent.
“As we were coming down the hill we saw cars and pickup trucks and semis stopped,” said Boyd. At the time, nobody was behind them.
With 30 years of commercial driving experience and winter tires, Boyd was able to safely pull over the electric vehicle he was driving, but by then vehicles had begun colliding behind them.
“Before we knew it, a flatbed truck slammed into the back of us, because it got hit by a semi [trailer truck], and I said to Barb, ‘We better get out of here.’”
Ironically, the 2020 Chevy Bolt he was driving was a courtesy car from Sunshine Coast GM. The truck that nearly totalled the electric vehicle was carrying two Teslas.
The pair managed to flee the car and headed towards a partition on the highway to escape the ongoing collisions. As they attempted to climb over, Hetherington was hit by a truck and slammed into the cement barrier.
They still managed to slide down the embankment to take shelter as the collisions continued.
People arrived with warm clothes and they retrieved blankets as they waited in the deep snow and frigid temperatures for first responders.
The first responders were forced to use a clamshell stretcher to pull Hetherington – whose hip they suspected was broken – up the embankment, and used climbing ropes secured to one of the overturned trucks on the highway.
Hetherington was one of the first people to be taken by ambulance away from the scene, said Boyd.
They were transported to Chilliwack General Hospital and both were released, with Hetherington suffering deep bruising on her tailbone and hip and Boyd experiencing more minor bruising.
“Even though it was just so chaotic, humanity really shone through yesterday,” Boyd told Coast Reporter on a ferry back to Langdale Feb. 11.
One man died and five people were seriously hurt but the RCMP said Thursday only one person remained in hospital with broken bones.
Thirty-four patients with non-life-threatening injuries were cared for at the scene, Emergency Health Services said.
The crash began with a semi-truck stopped in the S-curves on the mountainous highway, which was covered in glare ice.
By the time an officer arrived, a pickup truck had collided with the stopped tractor-trailer, which resulted in “a cascading, chain-reaction collision” involving at least two dozen vehicles including a bus, said the RCMP Feb. 11.
The driver of the pickup, a man in his 40s from the south Okanagan, died along with his dog, police said.
Crews had to remove more than 20 damaged vehicles, including jackknifed tractor-trailers, a bus, cars, a police cruiser and an ambulance that lost control in icy conditions on the curvy, downhill grade.
Road and weather conditions at the time “contributed significantly” to the crash and “speed relative to conditions also played a factor,” said Cpl. Mike Halskov of B.C. RCMP Traffic Services in a new release.
“In this collision, slower speeds may not have prevented collisions due to the highway being glare ice, but slower speeds may have reduced injury.”
The highway location near Hope, about 160 kilometres east of Vancouver, reopened at about 10 p.m., 12 hours after the collision.
Boyd and Hetherington arrived back in Gibsons, in their courtesy car, Thursday afternoon.
– with files from the Canadian Press
