CARSTAIRS – With more than two decades of firefighting service under his belt, the local department’s chief has seen all too many serious wrecks over the years.
But the holiday-period, multi-vehicle crash on Highway 2 that left nine people with non-life threatening injuries and one dead stood out as a first in his experience.
“It would be the biggest fire suppression I’ve had to do for a pileup,” said Carstairs Fire Department Chief Jordan Schaffer.
At about 10:10 p.m. on Dec. 27, Airdrie Mounties responded alongside an RCMP Criminal Collision Investigative Team with EMS and several fire departments from the area to a multi-vehicle crash on the northbound lanes of Highway 2 roughly a couple of kilometres north of Veterans Boulevard at Highway 72 in Rocky View County. Numerous vehicles subsequently caught fire.
The RCMP reported in a press statement issued Dec. 28 that preliminary efforts to determine what happened indicated that a commercial vehicle including a trailer, along with five sedan cars, four pickup trucks, three SUVs as well as a passenger van, were involved in the crash.
Authorities had at the time also cautioned people about poor driving conditions including extremely limited visibility due to intense fog and slippery roads and urged motorists to refrain from travelling.
Although the investigation into the cause of the collision remained ongoing, the main contributing factors were said by police to be weather and road conditions.
The fire departments that responded came from Crossfield, Carstairs, Didsbury, Airdrie and Balzac.
Schaffer told the Albertan during a Jan. 5 phone interview that a dozen of his members were called out to assist and were on the scene for between three to four hours.
“That was a very busy night,” he said. “We actually had multiple wrecks going on that night.”
There was also a collision north of town as well as another on Highway 2A, he said.
“And in the middle of all that, we had this big pileup near Crossfield, so we were running around pretty good,” he said, adding that justified requesting mutual aid from Didsbury to help with the heavy call volume.
By the time Carstairs firefighters made it to the scene, most of the patients had already either been loaded up into ambulances or were being tended to, he said.
“When our crews arrived, their priority was fire suppression and assisting Crossfield and Airdrie fire,” he said, praising Crossfield’s chief for doing a great job coordinating the response.
Carstairs firefighters helped their counterparts from Crossfield to snuff out five vehicle fires, he said.
“One (vehicle fire) was extinguished by the time we got there,” he said. “We were there more for the semi suppression that was needed – Crossfield definitely did the initial knock down on it and we came in and assisted there.”
Visibility was so poor that Schaffer said from his position on the north end of the scene on the southbound lanes that he could not see the complete pileup from end to end.
“It was so foggy, to see a 100 feet would be pushing it,” he said, urging motorists in such situations to drive accordingly and reduce speeds not only when conditions are bad but especially when emergency personnel are present.
“People were driving in that fog – even though you couldn’t see 100 feet – passing us at 100 kilometres an hour sometimes,” he said. “It was crazy.”
But his crew and all of the other firefighters kept their composure and professionally tackled the task at hand.
“I was very, very proud of my crews and all the crews that were on that scene,” he said. “That was a tough one to do.”
Although Schaffer said he has previously seen much larger pileups involving upwards of 50 to 60 vehicles, this emergency response was unlike any other he had ever experienced.
“For a vehicle to start on fire, that’s actually a very, very seldom chance; especially now with the safety (features built-in) to all the vehicles.”
Firefighters are no strangers to regularly seeing wrecks, but unlike embellished Hollywood fiction, vehicles don’t typically suddenly catch fire, he said.
“I’ve been doing this for 23 years. From wrecks, I bet you I’ve seen a dozen times where a vehicle started on fire,” he said. “And we do a lot of wrecks obviously on Highway 2. So, it does not happen very often, but it does happen.”
