Two collisions 45-minutes apart and in opposite directions kept the Keremeos fire department busy Tuesday afternoon.
At about 3:45 p.m. the department was called out to Highway 3A to assist with getting a woman driver out of a van that had run off the road and ended up about 30 feet down a ravine.
“We were able to get her up and out safely pretty quickly,” Jordy Bosscha, Keremeos fire chief said. “The person was taken out and carried up to an ambulance in a basket stretcher.”
The road was closed for about 45 minutes as the 10-firefighter crew worked to get the woman out of her vehicle.
The cause of the collision is not known.
Just as the crew was packing up another call came in to attend a single-vehicle collision near Chopaka on Highway 3.
A transport truck driver lost control of his rig and smashed into the side of the bluff on a tight corner near the Chopaka bridge.
Bosscha said the man was out of his vehicle before firefighters arrived on scene. Firefighters blocked the road partially to slow down traffic until Argo road maintenance arrived on scene to take over.
“We had a good turnout of members for those two calls,” Bosscha said.
The longtime fire chief said it isn’t too common that calls come in back-to-back like they did Tuesday adding that there have been times two calls have come in at once.
“We’ve had them at the same time with vehicles in different directions,” he said. “We don’t have (extrication) tools in every direction but we do have other ways to do work to get people out of vehicles.”
