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Parks Canada's response to road emergencies 'does not work': first responder

“We’ve got one of the deadliest 50-kilometre stretches on the Trans-Canada Highway from coast to coast. I don’t see any other stretches of 50 kilometres that have nine fatalities in one year already.”
0616 RCMP crash
More than 50 emergency personnel responded to a head-on crash near Field that left one person dead on Wednesday (June 14). RCMP PHOTO

FIELD, B.C. – A first responder who has attended all but one of the fatal accidents on the Trans-Canada Highway in Yoho National Park this year says Parks Canada’s current emergency response system is not working.

Nine people have died in five different vehicle collisions on a treacherous 40-kilometre stretch of undivided highway between Sherbrooke Creek and Yoho National Park’s western boundary so far this year.

There is no federal funding immediately available to twin the highway in the short-term, and first responder Patrick Cais said Parks Canada’s current regional approach to road emergencies means response times are too great as fire-rescue departments from Golden or Lake Louise respond.

“I truly believe that right now what we need is to have appropriate response on the highway, which is totally non-existent. The regional approach does not work,” said Cais, who is acting fire chief for Field Fire & Rescue and a paramedic based at BC Ambulance’s Field station.

“It is delaying the response times, it’s adding to stress on first responders, paramedics like myself and other people just being on scene, and it’s using other fire departments and everything is stretched to the limit,” he added.

“We’ve got one of the deadliest 50-kilometre stretches on the Trans-Canada Highway from coast to coast. I don’t see any other stretches of 50 kilometres that have nine fatalities in one year already.”

After lengthy negotiations between Parks Canada and Field Fire & Rescue broke down in 2020 over a new contract, the federal agency struck a deal with neighbouring Lake Louise and Golden fire departments for road rescue services on the national transportation corridor in Yoho National Park.

Field’s fire department, which has equipment for road rescue, only attends structure fires in the park now.

As a result, response times to vehicle collisions on the highway through Yoho National Park can vary from 20 to 45 minutes, depending on the location and the road conditions. Golden is 57 kms away and Lake Louise is 27 kms away from the community of Field.

Add to that extrication time of people trapped in vehicles if it is needed.

Mike Pecora, fire chief of Golden Fire-Rescue (GFR), said the department attended incidents in Yoho, including fatalities, only when requested through dispatch.

“Lake Louise and GFR worked together on several calls due to the nature and size of incident,” he said.

“We don’t always attend if it’s past our jurisdiction, but did on at least six times this year.”

The Lake Louise fire department has responded to 16 incidents in Yoho National Park so far in 2022, while the Banff Fire Department, in a rare occurrence, attended two vehicle collisions on the highway in Yoho to date this year.

One involved a major response of more than 50 emergency personnel for a June 15 head-on collision between a logging truck and sport utility vehicle near Field.

The driver of the SUV died and the driver of the logging truck was injured.

Following the impact, the tractor-trailer crashed down a steep embankment by the fast-flowing Kicking Horse River and caught on fire. The front part of the logging truck cab landed in the river, but the driver was able to escape.

Banff Fire Department was also called out on Aug. 15 for a semi-trailer rollover at the bottom of the Field hill at a time that Lake Louise Fire Department was busy responding to another incident on Highway 93 North in Banff National Park.

“We already had a truck in Lake Louise as they asked us to be on standby, so our response time was approximately 15 minutes from Lake Louise to the scene,” said Silvio Adamo, Banff’s fire chief and director of protective services for the Town of Banff.

Cais said this highlights Parks Canada’s plan for emergency response on the highway in Yoho National Park is stretched.

“We had two accidents where Banff Fire came, and that proved once again that there are some limits here, having just Lake Louise and Golden responding as long as they are not busy in their own jurisdictions,” he said.

“If you look at Banff, they’ve got to go across two jurisdictions – they have to go through Lake Louise Fire Department jurisdiction to have access to Yoho – that puts them about an hour drive away from their base and I am not sure that’s a really good position for a fire department.”

While Cais said the current system would not have resulted in a different outcome for any of this year’s fatal accidents on the Trans-Canada Highway, he said there are many other accidents on that treacherous stretch in which people are trapped in vehicles or seriously injured.

“In any of these incidents, responding faster wouldn’t have changed the outcome, so we’ve got to admit that, but that doesn’t mean there are not people injured in other incidents,” he said.

Emergency responders often refer to what is called the Golden Hour, which underlines the importance of acting promptly and rigorously when trauma occurs for the best possible outcome for an injured patient.

“Sometimes delaying the response could have large consequences for those people,” said Cais.

Cais spoke to at least one serious vehicle collision that he attended as a paramedic, which was located just a few kilometres away from Field.

“I was on the scene and having somebody struggling and being in a really bad position…  just seeing he was stuck in his tractor-trailer cab, and saying, ‘the fire department is coming, just hold on’,” he said.

“We were a few kilometres from Field, we had the equipment, we had everything in Field, but there was nobody responding from Field, so we had to wait for about 45 minutes for Golden to come,” he added.

“We’ve got to keep in mind that for each person dying on the highway, there are also people being injured and those people are suffering silently waiting for first a responder just to come to the scene.”

Often one of the first emergency responders to arrive on scene, Cais said the first task of a paramedic is patient care.

However, he said this is sometimes delayed, noting paramedics often end up taking on the role of incident commander, doing such duties as assessing the scene, calling dispatch, figuring out how many resources are needed, creating traffic controls – and the list goes on.

“When I arrive on scene as a paramedic there is nobody else to support us,” said Cais.

“I have to set up right way so that delays taking care of the patient and it makes it more stressful for us, as first responders, because certainly we have to do multiple tasks.”

In addition, Cais said there are many occasions when Parks Canada employees, whether law enforcement or highway services, are not able to respond in a timely manner.

“They’ve got limited resources for enforcement and also limited resources for the highway department and they might not be on scene, and they be might in Lake Louise, or they might be on the Highway 93 North, or they might go down towards Kootenay,” he said. “It's limited, so it’s not necessarily reliable. It’s not an appropriate way to do things, it’s not working,”

In 2003, the Department of Justice concluded that Parks Canada has an obligation to ensure structural fire suppression, motor vehicle accident response, and hazardous material containment responses are available in Yoho National Park. This was also laid out in the 2016-17 contract established between Parks Canada and the Field Fire & Rescue Department.

With growing visitation to the park and the national transportation corridor running through it, the fire department started seeing a growing number of emergency calls on the highway, up to 33 road-related incidents such as vehicle collisions, vehicle fires or hazardous material spills in 2019.

The department, which has been without a full-time fire chief since July 2019, had wanted a full-time paid fire chief and argued the existing agreement with Parks Canada made it difficult for the volunteer fire department to meet legal and administrative obligations that came with this increased workload.

As a result, the demoralized department told Parks Canada it could only respond to structural fire protection in the community of Field and surrounding area and the contract for road rescue services was not renewed.

Parks Canada officials say road rescue services are now provided by Lake Louise and Golden fire departments with support from BC Ambulance, the RCMP, STARS air ambulance and Parks Canada.

“This collaborative, regional approach to road rescue services is consistent with rural locations throughout Alberta and British Columbia,” said Suzanne White, a spokesperson for Lake Louise, Yoho and Kootenay in an emailed statement.

“Parks Canada is committed to facilitate coordination with third party emergency services providers, and work with them as partners when they respond to emergency calls within parks, including road rescue, ambulance and structural fire calls.”

White said Parks is aware that the Field Fire Department has expressed concerns about its capacity for the increased administrative requirements for a volunteer fire department.

She said Parks has reached out to the fire services division of the Columbia Shuswap Regional District, which oversees 13 paid-on-call fire departments to discuss insights on how the challenges identified by the Field Fire Department are handled in similar neighbouring communities.

“We understand that this is a common challenge for many smaller volunteer fire departments,” she said.

Meanwhile, the preliminary design and environmental assessment for twinning the remaining 40-km section between Sherbrooke Creek and the western end of Yoho National Park was wrapped up in 2021.

The impact assessment indicates this stretch of the Trans-Canada has a higher accident rate than average for similar highways in B.C. It states the forecast growth in traffic, to exceed 23,000 vehicles per day in summer by 2046, will contribute to an increase in motor vehicle accidents.

According to the project overview, there were 234 collisions, including 132 injuries and five fatalities between 2012 and 2016.

“The project is positioned to proceed as funding becomes available,” said Megan Hope, a media relations spokesperson in Parks Canada’s national office.

Dee Morrison, the wife of Calgarian Scott Morrison who died in a head-on collision on Feb. 5, is calling for the federal government to make twinning on the highway a greater priority and to find the funding.

On June 15, a head-on crash between a logging truck and SUV one kilometre west of Field left one man dead and sent another to a Calgary hospital via STARS air ambulance.

On July 2, a 31-year-old Alberta man was killed when a vehicle collided with a semi-truck about 17 kilometres west of Field. The driver of the semi-truck was uninjured. On Aug. 28, three people were killed when two semi-trucks – one of which was transporting cattle – collided at the west boundary of the park, forcing a 37-hour highway closure.

Most recently, on Sept. 13, two people were killed when their eastbound SUV and a westbound semi-truck collided about eight kilometres west of Field near Finn Creek.

However, Cais and other sources say there was one other fatality on the highway 500 metres east of Field on Jan 14 that had previously gone unreported by the Outlook.

In the meantime, Cais is worried about the ongoing carnage, especially when the Trans-Canada Highway reopens on Dec. 1 following this two-month construction blitz in Kicking Horse Canyon east of Golden. Traffic is currently being diverted through Kootenay National Park, though the highway will temporarily open over Thanksgiving weekend.

“I am expecting to see more accidents happening then,” said Cais.

“Everything we have seen so far, it’s not going to get better. I believe it's just going to be the same way or get worse.”

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