‘This is impacting everyone’ No one in Dauphin spared from horror of highway crash By: Erik Pindera Posted: 11:03 AM CDT Friday, Jun. 16, 2023 Last Modified: 5:44 PM CDT Sunday, Jun. 18, 2023 Updates

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This article was published 16/06/2023 (1170 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

DAUPHIN — The uncertain but devastating reality was clear Friday morning when Mayor David Bosiak pulled into his parking spot outside city hall after a mostly sleepless night.

In the lot next door, at the city’s senior centre, there were vehicles that had been there since early Thursday morning. It was the meeting point for a group made up mostly of seniors who boarded a bus to have some fun on a day trip to Sand Hills Casino, a couple of hours south, in Carberry.

The group was scheduled to return at about 7:30 Thursday evening.

As every one of Dauphin’s 8,500 residents — and millions of others in Manitoba, across Canada and around the world — knew earlier in the day, the outing ended in a fiery, horrifying nightmare a few kilometres from the casino, at the now-infamous intersection of the Trans-Canada Highway and Highway 5, when the bus was hit by a semi-trailer, killing 15 and sending 10 survivors to hospitals in Winnipeg, Portage la Prairie and Brandon in a massive air and ground emergency effort to save their lives.

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The catastrophe ranks as one of Canada’s worst-ever highway crashes and bears a chilling resemblance to the tragic circumstances that ended the lives of 16 people and forever changed those of the 13 who survived aboard the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team’s bus, hit by a semi-trailer near Armley, Sask., in April 2018.

“This is impacting everyone,” Bosiak said. “It’s different for different people; we’re all feeling it, some people at a level that is beyond comprehension.”

There aren’t many people in Dauphin who don’t know or have some connection to one of the people who were on the wheelchair-accessible bus operated by a local company.

“We were advised early on by the RCMP that – lessons learned from past major situations like this – they said it’s better to not provide information if it’s not 100 per cent accurate,” Bosiak said, explaining why he couldn’t provide frantic residents with much information in the immediate aftermath of the collision or, for that matter, even now.

“If you don’t know, don’t say, but that’s the hard part,” he said. “That’s what people want right now, they want information.”

He, members of the city administration and emergency officials are co-ordinating resources and communicating what they know. Bosiak spoke with political leaders and officials in the health-care system and with the RCMP. Trauma counsellors were expected to be sent to Dauphin’s schools Friday and in the coming days.

“The level of compassion and care seems to be overwhelming — we’re just trying to get organized. You plan for this, but you’ve never experienced it, and even the scenarios that our (emergency management) people have gone through, you don’t expect it to be you,” he said.

“My job, partly, is to try to be as optimistic as I can, and knowing that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, and you can barely see it…. However, we have to grieve, and some people will grieve differently.”

In the afternoon Friday, city staff prepared the curling rink at Dauphin’s recreation centre to serve as a gathering place for residents who need somewhere to mourn communally.

Inside, some staff set up a couple of dozen tables — each with enough space to seat 40-plus people — while others unloaded boxes of baked goods and jugs of coffee.

“A community grieves, and our hearts to go out to those responders that were on scene; it’s never an easy process,” an emotional Dauphin Fire Department Chief Cameron Abrey told reporters outside city hall.

“The smaller (community fire) departments, nobody signed up for an incident such as this. The fire departments that responded to the incident are… (volunteers), and I personally know many of those that were on scene.”

Despite the extensive training emergency responders go through there’s nothing that could prepare them for the carnage they worked in Thursday, he said.

Fire departments from British Columbia to Newfoundland, are extending their thoughts for Dauphin, he said.

“Emergency services really are a small family when it comes to the healing process,” the fire chief said.

The mayor said Dauphin’s city manager has spoken with people in civic administration in Humboldt, to learn from that community’s crushing experience.

Dauphin Active Living Centre administrator Kim Armstrong knew the people on the bus. She has worked at the facility, doing everything but cooking, for the past 17 years.

“Today’s been a long day… it’s just overwhelming,” she said. “The number of people that we think we know were on the bus — because nothing’s confirmed — but getting calls from families, trying to make connections.”

Her voice wavered from behind a desk stacked high with papers.

“It’s overwhelming, to get all this straight in our heads,” she said. “The staff is quite affected, but we’re here to support seniors.”

Some seniors gathered to play bingo at the facility Friday.

“There is no age to a tragedy, this guts the community — 15 lives lost immediately, that’s a hole. That’s a hole, here. We’re grieving,” Armstrong said.

The centre was not involved in organizing the bus trip, Armstrong said, adding they were doing something they loved to do.

“And tragedy struck, but they were happy, active people doing what they wanted to do. I wish that it never had happened. But that’s what we want our seniors in our community to be, is active and vibrant,” she said.

“We’ve had a loss, but I hope that some of (the injured) will come back.”

Just after 9 a.m., 80-year-old Hilda Inkster sat near the door at Corrina’s on Main with a group of friends, drinking coffee and tea. The restaurant is adjacent to the senior centre.

She knew one man who was on the bus. He lives on the farm still, she said, and his son is in a relationship with her granddaughter.

“I don’t feel good. That’s about all I can do… the kids went to Winnipeg, of course, right away, to check what’s going on,” said Inkster, who’s lived in Dauphin since immigrating from Germany in 1950.

“He was alive, but he was going through surgery. How bad he is, I don’t know, but not good.”

There was little else to talk about at Corrina’s. Manager Cheryl Sokol, whose sister owns the place, said the overall atmosphere had been sombre since it opened for breakfast.

“Sitting here, eating here, there’s chatter at that table and that table, and everybody knows somebody who was on that bus… you can feel it in the air, that it’s just different,” said Sokol, 54.

“But you have to go on.”

She has only lived in Dauphin a few years, but has come to know it as friendly, open and giving — a place where you can get to know people.

Sokol’s not sure she knew anyone who died or is injured, but they could have been customers.

“It’s just devastating to know that somebody’s mother, somebody’s father, their aunt, uncle, their family — it breaks my heart that families have changed. Their lives are changed forever,” she said, adding she, too, had noticed the parked cars in the senior centre’s parking lot.

“It brought it home that this really happened, and it happened to people here in town.”

Sandra Kaletta came close to going on the trip.

“I thought about going,” Kaletta said. “I saw the trip on a poster somewhere. It was the first trip to the casino since COVID. I was thinking of saying to my husband we should go on the little day trip.

“But I guess a little voice said, ‘Maybe don’t go,’ so I didn’t. I didn’t even mention it to my husband. I only told him (Thursday) after I heard. “I think I probably know everybody who was on that bus. But because the seniors community in Dauphin is a pretty close knit community, probably everyone knows them.”

Kaletta said she knows the bus driver — who is in hospital — from past trips she has taken with him.

“I know him quite well,” she said. “He knew very well what he was doing while driving. I’d feel very confident in driving with him. It was an accident, tragic, but an accident.”

She knows the days and weeks ahead will be sad ones.

“It’s going to take a long time for the community to get over such a tragic loss,” she said. “I’ve already been to several funerals lately, but I cannot comprehend going to this many more.”

— With files from Kevin Rollason

erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @erik_pindera

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Erik Pindera
Reporter

Erik Pindera is a reporter for the Free Press, mostly focusing on crime and justice. The born-and-bred Winnipegger attended Red River College Polytechnic, wrote for the community newspaper in Kenora, Ont. and reported on television and radio in Winnipeg before joining the Free Press in 2020.  Read more about Erik.

Every piece of reporting Erik produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.