On the third anniversary Tuesday of a fatal bus crash on Bamfield Road, Huuy-a-aht Chief Robert Dennis Sr. said safety upgrades kickstarted by the crash are half finished, with paving set to begin in the spring.
“It’s a sad day — we’re looking forward to getting the road improvements completed so we don’t see this type of accident again,” said Dennis. “It took that accident, even though we had numerous of our own members killed in vehicle accidents on that road.”
On Sept. 13, 2019, a Wilson’s Transportation coach carrying 45 UVic students and two teaching assistants was travelling to Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre from Port Alberni when the bus moved to the right on the gravel Bamfield Main for an oncoming vehicle, sank into the shoulder, toppled on its side and slid down an embankment.
Two students were killed — Emma Machado of Winnipeg and John Geerdes of Iowa City, Iowa — and many others injured, some of whom have filed lawsuits in the wake of the crash.
Premier John Horgan promised a week after the crash to upgrade the road.
The 76.6-kilometre Bamfield Main includes about 60 kilometres of road owned by Western Forest Products and 18 owned by Mosaic Forest Management, the Huu-ay-aht First Nations and the Ministry of Transportation.
Brad Johnson, who is on the Huu-ay-aht First Nation executive council overseeing infrastructure, said the work is being done in three 25-kilometre stretches starting at the Bamfield end and ending with the stretch to Port Alberni. Work is expected to pause in late fall when the weather turns stormy and restart in the spring.
Some sections are being widened, others raised in areas of winter flooding, and proper ditching is being dug along the road to improve rainwater drainage. “That’s great because flooding was a huge issue in the winter time,” said Johnson.
The road top will be finished with hard compacted gravel — which engineers expect to hold over the winter — with plans to chip seal and pave next spring, said Johnson.
Steel guard rails are being added in sections — including the site of the crash — and lighting is planned. Concrete barriers will line approaches to the nearly 20 single-lane bridges.
Emma’s mother Ethel Machado, who was on holiday in the Okanagan on Tuesday, said the family plans to visit Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre next year, when their daughter and her seat-mate on the bus, John Geerdes, would have graduated.
“It’s just difficult to know what will be healing without triggering unnecessary trauma,” Machado said in an interview. The last time they were in Victoria was to pack up their daughter’s dorm room.
Mary Murphy, Geerdes’ mother, said the family has not yet visited Bamfield but may some day. Her son had a big personality and his absence has “profoundly” affected his four siblings, family and friends, she said.
“Our hope for the young people who survived the bus crash is the same as for our own children — we want them to experience joy in everyday living,” Murphy said in an email.
Kristi Simpson, UVic’s vice-president finance and operations, said of the three-year anniversary of the crash: “We are thinking of John and Emma, the students who lost their lives on the road that night, as well as those who are living with the memories of this incident.”
There is no student trip planned to Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre this fall due to staffing shortages that have left the centre unable to host weekend programming “when many field trips occur,” the university said.
In late April and early May, UVic hosted a trip to Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre for about 24 students who were on the bus that crashed, accompanied by three science faculty staff, a counsellor and a spiritual leader. The Huu-ay-aht First Nations performed a special ceremony for the group.
Students found the trip to be “an opportunity for healing,” UVic president Kevin Hall said in an April letter to families. The majority of the students travelled by passenger van from Victoria to Port Alberni and then by ferry from Port Alberni to Bamfield.
In July 2021, UVic completed implementation of 43 recommendations that arose from an independent report on the crash — including ensuring travel happens in daylight and passengers wear seatbelts, improving emergency communications devices and contact lists, and including staff with appropriate first-aid training on trips.
Road improvements were called for, though an RCMP investigation noted that the road where the collision occurred “was wide enough to permit both vehicles to pass in opposing directions without contact.”
The coroner’s report said the deaths were caused in part by a lack of seatbelt use. The chartered bus had been fitted with seatbelts, but their use by students was not enforced by the driver or school staff, the report said
In B.C., Motor Vehicle Act regulations require passengers to use seatbelts in all vehicles except those originally manufactured without seatbelts, but the report said use of seatbelts “on coach buses is not consistently regulated across Canada.”
While driving through the Okanagan this week, Machado said she imagined the world through Emma’s eyes and how excited her daughter was to be in B.C. “It gives me a little bit of comfort to think she was feeling good — even though the road was a little bouncy — and she wasn’t afraid and she was happy,” said Machado, her voice breaking with emotion.
“If you have to die, you want to be in a good state of mind and we know she was really happy where she was, and with what she was doing, and we wouldn’t have been able to convince her to not go on that trip.
“But you can’t help but kind of question, you know, were there things that could have been done differently — and clearly there were from the report — but that doesn’t change the outcome.”
ceharnett@timescolonist.com
