Ebus may have become airborne during fatal Christmas Eve crash
One of the first drivers on the scene of the Christmas Eve Ebus crash that claimed four lives says road conditions were typical for winter driving at that time.
Bill Gerber, his wife Bonnie and daughter Brooklyn, were en route from Abbotsford to Kelowna when they came upon the crash at 6:36 p.m.
“They were typical winter driving conditions that we see every Christmas when we go to Kelowna, meaning compact snow,” Bonnie Gerber told iNFOnews.ca. “We weren’t slipping. We weren’t scared. We marvelled at some of the reports that it was icy and dangerous and treacherous. It was winter driving though. We were going 80 km/h, maybe, rather than the 120 we would be doing in the summer.”
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The accident happened about 600 metres east of the turnoff to the Loon Lake rest stop.
“Several hundred yards back we had to come to a stop,” Bonnie said. “The car in front of us was stopped too. We rolled down our window and he (the driver) got out and said: ‘Hey, there’s an accident up ahead. I think we can slip by.’ He said there’s lots of space and it looks like lots of people there to help.”
That driver did continue on his way.
“We had no clue what was there,” Bonnie said. “We said: ‘Oh ya, let’s keep going.’ When we got right up to it we said: ‘Oh it’s a bus. Oh there’s lots of people.’ We opened the door and we could hear crying. It was just clearly something way more than a single car accident with a fender bender type of thing.”
The bus tracks were clearly visible crossing the median from the westbound to the eastbound lane.
“This may sound crazy, but I wonder if the bus, maybe, went airborne a little bit,” Bill Gerber said. “It’s almost like the bus – maybe it was already leaning – you can see the tracks and then when it hit the road, it’s higher up. Maybe it kind of launched it and in the air it twisted on its side and, boom.”
He said others told police the same thing.
"I've had a couple witnesses tell me it felt like the bus was going airborne," B.C. Highways Patrol Const. James Ward told iNFOnews.ca. "Everything was shaky and blurry and nobody knows exactly what’s going on but they felt like it went airborne so it would be safe to say the bus probably caught some air."
Highway patrol officers were up in the area until about 3:45 p.m. At that time there wasn't a lot of snow and the roads were bare because everything was melting. That changed after the sun set.
"By the time the bus was up there the roads were very poor, covered in snow and ice and it was actively raining and hailing," Ward said. "So the weather shifted."
The first emergency calls came in at 6:14 p.m. and, by the time officers got to the scene, the roads were bad with driving snow, he said.
That's not how Gerber saw it.
While driving towards Merritt earlier in the evening, they ran into a stretch of black ice that continued for about five miles, he said. He slowed down to about 5 km/h and drove with one set of tires on the snowy shoulder.
Transport trucks were pulled over and chaining up. He saw one driver step out of his cab and crash to the ground on the icy surface.
That was not at all like the scene of the bus crash where people were walking about with ease.
“You would think, if this was such a terrible, treacherous place, why were there no other vehicles stopped there?” Bill said. “You don’t close the road just because you have compact snow because the whole of the Okanagan has compact snow all over the road. That’s what roads are like in wintertime.”
He doesn’t want the highways maintenance crews to take flack for the road conditions.
“They typically don’t sand the whole highway, and what good would it do anyway?” Bill said. “If you drive according to the conditions I think it would have been fine. I don’t want to point a finger because I don’t know if there was a mechanical failure on the bus. My feeling is that it must have been going quite fast.”
It wasn’t the condition of the road that got the Gerber family’s attention. It was the need to help.
Bonnie was a nurse many years ago and Brooklyn had first aid training so they stopped to help, spending about an hour and a half at the scene.
“We were just staying close to people, trying to make them comfortable, encouraging them,” Bonnie said. “That was all. We really couldn’t do anything. I immediately focused on a couple of women who were crying.”
All the passengers who were able to get out were out of the bus by that time. It was lying on the passenger door side so, Bonnie suspects, most just walked through the smashed front window.
It took about 20 minutes for emergency crews and ambulances to arrive.
“Was it ever good to hear the sirens far off and getting closer and see them get there,” Bill posted on his Facebook page. “Soon there was an armada of emergency vehicles.”
“We were so happy they were there,” he told iNFOnews.ca. “They just came and took control and did their thing and we were ever so happy to see them.”
Bill found a laptop and went around to the passengers until he found the owner.
Then he found a cellphone.
“I tried to find the owner amongst the passengers there, but with no luck,” he wrote on Facebook. “I did not know if I should put it back on the ground or take it with us. We took it with us, thinking we could find the owner in the hospital in Kelowna or Penticton.”
After all the emergency vehicles left, the phone started ringing. It was the parents trying to find their daughter. They suggested the parents check with the hospitals but that failed to find the daughter.
“Brooklyn unwittingly became the last link to an 18-year-old girl who did not arrive home on Christmas Eve as planned,” Bill posted. “Instead, it was the RCMP that arrived at their home. Around 5:30 a.m., we got a call with terrible news.”
The daughter was one of four people who died in the crash.
“How was it we picked up her phone?” Bill wrote. “She was near the back of the bus (we later found out). We returned the phone to the mourning family last night (Dec. 27). They were very, very grateful. I knew then, we had done the right thing in keeping the phone with us.”
None of the Gerbers feel they did anything special in stopping and offering what help they could.
Bill praised a couple from Merritt – all he knows of them is that their names were Brandy and Sonny – who stood out as helpers. They phoned a relative who was in the RCMP for guidance.
There was another woman at the scene who helped. They only know her by her brown leather boots. There were also passengers from the bus who “really took charge.”
READ MORE: B.C. bus crash probe to look at earlier incident too, amid questions over icy road
It was a traumatic scene.
“We heard those trying to keep the mother of one of the other passengers alive, as she was trapped inside,” Bill wrote. “We felt the anguish and pain of the daughter, when she realized her mother had passed. At the time, it was just one of the scenarios happening.”
The Gerbers are not finished helping.
On the way back to Abbotsford on Monday they stopped at the crash scene. Bill found cell phones, a laptop and two sets of keys in the snow.
One keychain has a library tag on it and another a Veteran’s tag that should help identify the owners.
Bill hasn’t been able to get the cell phones to work and is still trying to figure out how to find the owners.
The whole experience is still a little unreal.
“You hear about these things in the Reader’s Digest’s true life experiences but I’ve never come across that in my 62 years,” Bill said. “It’s a bit of shock to see it in real life.”
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