Post by Low Light Mike on Sept 1, 2007 17:59:16 GMT -8
On Labour Day weekend in 1977, 11 people were killed in Vancouver Island's worst ever traffic accident.
It happened at an unsignaled intersection on the Island Highway, in Lantzville. The location is very close to the north-end "Welcome to Nanaimo" sign, where Highways 19 & 19A now split-off from each other.
It was a 3-way collision between a bus (en route to Victoria? from Campbell River), a pickup truck and a flat-bed semi (with heavy equipment on the flat bed).
I have found virtually nothing on the internet, re this accident. I found 1 brief mention in a data base called "great Canadian disasters". So these details are from my memory.
Apparently the accident was a fluke of timing, as the pickup pulled out into traffic, causing the accident. The flatbed-semi swerved and collided with the bus coming from the other direction. 1 fatality was the pickup driver; the other 10 fatalities were on the bus.
I was 9 years old at the time, and me & my family happened to be camping a couple of KM's away, that weekend. So we heard the sirens, and saw the highway traffic diverted down a country-road all day long.
I remember reading the news story in the old Nanaimo Daily Free Press, reading and re-reading the story, as its tragedy had me spell bound. My photo-memory says that the headline was "11 killed in worst Island crash", or something like that.
20 years later, I was working on a job at the Nanaimo Hospital, and happened to be working with a man who had been in charge of the morgue, back in those days. So I asked him if he remembered that 1977 Labour Day weekend. For sure, he remembered it, as he was of course called into work (from whatever he was doing on that holiday weekend), to deal with the worst disaster in terms of deaths that the hospital had ever seen.
It happened at an unsignaled intersection on the Island Highway, in Lantzville. The location is very close to the north-end "Welcome to Nanaimo" sign, where Highways 19 & 19A now split-off from each other.
It was a 3-way collision between a bus (en route to Victoria? from Campbell River), a pickup truck and a flat-bed semi (with heavy equipment on the flat bed).
I have found virtually nothing on the internet, re this accident. I found 1 brief mention in a data base called "great Canadian disasters". So these details are from my memory.
Apparently the accident was a fluke of timing, as the pickup pulled out into traffic, causing the accident. The flatbed-semi swerved and collided with the bus coming from the other direction. 1 fatality was the pickup driver; the other 10 fatalities were on the bus.
I was 9 years old at the time, and me & my family happened to be camping a couple of KM's away, that weekend. So we heard the sirens, and saw the highway traffic diverted down a country-road all day long.
I remember reading the news story in the old Nanaimo Daily Free Press, reading and re-reading the story, as its tragedy had me spell bound. My photo-memory says that the headline was "11 killed in worst Island crash", or something like that.
20 years later, I was working on a job at the Nanaimo Hospital, and happened to be working with a man who had been in charge of the morgue, back in those days. So I asked him if he remembered that 1977 Labour Day weekend. For sure, he remembered it, as he was of course called into work (from whatever he was doing on that holiday weekend), to deal with the worst disaster in terms of deaths that the hospital had ever seen.
