PEACHLAND Warrant Officer Dan Lamoureux of Vancouver Island was shocked to find survivors in a tangled mess of metal amid a patch of broken tears in the Okanagan Valley.He was in a Buffalo search-and-rescue plane almost 300 metres in the air when he spotted the wreckage of a small plane, a twin-engine Piper PA-30 Comanche, that went down hours earlier, killing a 30-year-old man and critically injuring three others.Lamoureux and another search-and-rescue technician strapped on their parachutes, aimed for an open field a short distance from the crash site and jumped out of the Buffalo, which by then was more than 750 metres above the ground.When they landed, they set into the trees on foot, Lamoureux said in an interview Tuesday, a day after the fatal crash.The search-and-rescue technicians eventually reached the crash site, where they found what was left of the plane on the forest floor. Its wings were broken off and the fuselage was no longer in one piece, he said.From a distance, we yell, Hello, hello, were search and rescue. Were here to help! recalled Lamoureux.And, oh my God, I couldnt believe I heard a response from a female voice.Lamoureux had been on his way to the 19 Wing Comox air force base from a training mission Monday afternoon when a WestJet airliner reported picking up an emergency locator beacon.It took the Buffalo almost two hours to locate the wreckage in an area near the community of Peachland on the west side of Okanagan Lake. The plane left Penticton en route to Boundary Bay, south of Vancouver, when it crashed.One person, later identified by the coroner as 30-year-old Jayson Dallas Wesley Smith of Vancouver, was dead. The woman who called for help was sitting up and able to talk, while the two other survivors were unconscious, said Lamoureux.Soon after, firefighters, police and paramedics arrived at the scene. An air ambulance and a military Cormorant helicopter landed in a field.As the firefighters and search-and-rescue technicians removed the survivors, the air ambulance transported two of them to a nearby hospital. One of those two patients was later transferred to Vancouver, said the Transportation Safety Board. The third was airlifted in the Cormorant to Kamloops.Everything worked like clockwork, said Lamoureux, crediting the various agencies involved.The survivors conditions were not made public, although a spokeswoman for the B.C. Coroners Service said at least one of the patients was not doing at all well.The Transportation Safety Board sent two investigators to the scene, where they were expected to examine the aircraft before attempting the delicate task of speaking with survivors.
