Policing the Fringe. Charles Scheideman

a mile long, only one lane wide in parts, and was chiseled into a clay cliff about four hundred feet above the churning water of the river. The Big Slide was very well known by the locals. It was near the midpoint of the road between the two towns and when travellers had crossed it, they felt that the trip was as good as done.

      I was working at the Lytton detachment and soon became familiar with, but a little afraid of, the road to Lillooet. There was very little traffic on that road but it was a common location for traffic crashes. Vehicles met head-on in the sharp curves or they were struck by falling rocks from the canyon walls above.

      The Breathalyzer, a tool for measuring a person’s blood alcohol content, was a relatively new addition to the Mounted Police equipment at that time. There was a shortage of both instruments and trained operators due to chronic budget shortfalls for training and the sometimes questionable placement of the equipment that was available. Lytton detachment was issued a Breathalyzer because it was on the Trans-Canada Highway and had a qualified Breathalyzer operator stationed there—me. Lytton was also considered close enough to three other detachments that drinking driver suspects could be transported there for tests. Lillooet was one of the locations required to haul their impaired driving suspects to Lytton, in spite of the forty-two mile trail between the two villages.

      Placement of the available Breathalyzers was also influenced by the fact that the Mounted Police had still not started to pay overtime. There was no cost involved for rolling me out of bed three or four nights a week to do the tests.

      It was about one thirty in the morning when I got a call that an impaired driver had been arrested at Lillooet and the patrol was enroute to Lytton for a Breathalyzer test. I dressed and went to the Lytton police office to prepare for the test. About an hour had passed since the call came in and the patrol had not arrived. I called on the radio to check on their progress. The radio response was almost inaudible; a muffled voice advised there had been an accident. The patrol car had fallen into a hole and there were other cars in there with it. The police driver did not think he had any serious injuries, but he was concerned about his intoxicated passenger. The policeman had not been able to get to the other vehicles that he could see in the hole. From what he was able to see of the other cars, he felt there would be severe injuries or fatalities.

      Radio contact was very poor but I did learn that the hole they were in was on the Lytton side of the Big Slide and that our driver thought he was nearing Lytton when it happened. He advised that he was going to try to get back up to the roadway to prevent the next vehicle from going in on top of those already there. I called for an ambulance and other detachment members to assist, and I advised the remaining policeman at Lillooet and our dispatch centre at Kamloops of what I knew. They called the highways maintenance crew to provide barricades and to close the roadway immediately; meanwhile, I drove out to find the scene.

      About fourteen miles from Lytton, I came around a curve to see a flashlight waving frantically across the roadway. As I got closer in the total darkness my headlights revealed a mud-covered person with a flashlight standing by a huge crater where the roadway had been. About forty feet of the entire road was gone, including the ditch and some of the bank from the uphill side. Where there had been a two-lane paved highway, there was now a hole with vertical walls of about fifteen feet on three sides. The mud bottom of the hole sloped sharply toward the open side in the direction of the river.

      The bottom of the hole was sloppy mud with a small stream running through the middle of the still slowly moving mass. The police car was standing on its front end, which was pushed into the mud nearly up to the windshield. The rear bumper was below the level of the road. The rear wheels of the police car were resting against the wall of the hole.

      The mud-covered officer was badly bruised, but had no cuts or broken bones. He told me there were at least two other cars down there on the Lytton side of the hole. One was on its roof, and the other was upright with severe front end damage. Several people were badly hurt, and one was dead.

      We set flares and barricades on each side of the missing section of roadway and then went into the hole to assess the situation. I walked over the edge on the downhill side of the highway and went to the area where the roadway had fallen out. The debris field from the slide had crashed into the trees below and had caused a small clearing in the forest. The entire mass was sloppy mud, just a little too thick to continue flowing down the hill toward the river. The mud in the middle of the hole was more than knee deep and almost impossible to move through; as I struggled to pull one foot free, the other would sink deeper, forcing me to move on my hands and knees. I knew then why I had not been able to recognize the policeman with the flashlight.

      The ambulance arrived and we struggled to get stretchers into the hole and back out with five injured men and a dead woman. In the darkness, mud, and confusion, we thought that we had accounted for all the people who had been in the vehicles, but we were wrong. We soon realized that one of the men from the second vehicle was missing.

      About this time, a tow truck arrived on the Lillooet side of the hole and began the task of lifting the police car out.

      Daylight arrived and we were able to examine the scene more thoroughly. We searched the mud and debris below the hole for the missing man but failed to find any trace of him. He was familiar with the area but no tracks could be seen below the highway where he might have walked out. A patrol to his home learned that he had not been seen for a few days and his family believed he was still in Lillooet. One of the crash victims said he thought he had seen him crawling away into the darkness toward the Lillooet side of the hole. This information caused us to closely examine the hole where the police car had just been lifted out. The body of the missing man was pressed into the mud at the bottom of this hole. In the total darkness and confusion he had crawled through the mud until he was at the base of the wall of the hole on the Lillooet side. He had probably just managed to struggle to that location when the police car fell into the hole on top of him.

      In the days after the slide, when talking with the three drivers, we pieced together the events of that evening. The occupants of the first car had been visiting with friends in Lillooet and they were late getting on the road for the drive home. They came around a bend in the road and saw the blackness of the hole; the driver at first mistook it as a new section of asphalt. He took no evasive action and suddenly fell into the hole at about fifty miles per hour. His car flew across most of the very loose mud and crashed into the relatively solid opposite side wall of the hole. The heavy front end of the car left the road first and therefore fell farther than the rear, leaving the car at a downward angle when it crashed. This caused the passengers to be thrown toward the upper edge of the windshield, and resulted in fatal head and neck injuries to the woman who had been seated in the middle of the front seat.

      The driver of the second car had been in bed at his home near Lillooet when he was awakened by two Native men who asked him to give them a ride to Lytton. The two were quite drunk and the driver was new to the area; against his better judgement, and partly out of fear of the two, he agreed to do as they asked. He came around the curve and saw what he thought was a new patch of asphalt but, realizing what it was an instant later, he slammed on the brakes and steered left. This car went over the edge at a lower speed than the first and it landed on its front end in the mud with just enough momentum to go end over end to where it stopped close beside the first car, upside down and facing back in the direction it had come from. The driver had a broken femur and was in severe pain. He had suggested to his two passengers that they stay in his car, but they chose to crawl out. One of them crawled to the wall on the Lillooet side of the hole.

      The police driver came around the curve and saw the black area. He was familiar with the road and braked very hard, locking all four wheels. The police car screeched toward the hole, slowing rapidly; the front wheels went over the edge and it seemed for an instant that the car would stop, but it continued to slide forward on its frame and it dropped straight down into the mud, killing the man who had crawled to the wall of the hole. The impaired driving suspect in the rear of the police car fell forward against the security screen and broke his collar bone.

      The police car driver had only enough time to assess the situation in his car and look around with his flashlight when I called him on the radio. He then left the car and fought his way through the mud up to the highway, to prevent any further mayhem.