A very busy morning for emergency responders in Greater Moncton.
They were called to the area of Church Street and Donald Avenue at around 9:20 a.m. Tuesday for reports of a vehicle in Halls Creek, a tributary of the Petitcodiac River.
“We could see a vehicle sitting at the bottom of the river and in the middle of the river on its side,” Moncton Fire Platoon Chief Brian McDonald told our newsroom.
The car was mostly submerged, and it was difficult to determine if anyone was inside.
“We mobilized our water rescue and rope rescue techs, because it was a low-angle rescue type incident, to get to the bottom of the river and the vehicle. We couldn’t determine from the shoreline if there were people inside or not. The water rescue techs finally made it to the vehicle using ropes and ladders and operating on the ice of the shoreline, which proved to be very challenging,” McDonald says.
“Once they got access to the vehicle, it was determined that there were two patients inside. At that point, we had been on the scene for a minimum of 30 minutes, and the operation changed from a rescue to a recovery mode. The operation consisted of getting the vehicle out of the water and pulling it up onto the shoreline because it was too dangerous to try and remove the two adult males out of the vehicle. The Bore had just passed and the water was rising quickly, which made it too risky. The water was very cold. It’s moving at a fast pace in that area. So it was a dangerous operation for us.”
There’s no word yet on how the vehicle ended up in the water, but McDonald says it appears the car left the road.
“We could see in the shoreline and in the grass and the mud, evidence of the car leaving the road and travelling through the field and into the mud and then into the water. Why that happened, we don’t know,” McDonald says.
It was a complex operation for the emergency responders that involved numerous departments including Moncton Fire, RCMP and Ambulance New Brunswick.
“It involved two of our specialties at the fire department. First, a water rescue specialty. Those are specially trained firefighters who know how to operate in the water. The other specialty team was our rope rescue, our technical rescue team. There’s specialty training involved,” McDonald says.
Four of the five departments were at the scene of this incident, he says.
“It creates challenges as well to provide a good level of service when one incident requires so much of our resources. I was speaking with the Dieppe Fire Department, putting them on notification to see what they could offer for us in terms of water rescue. There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to managing these incidents and we rely on our mutual aid partners,” McDonald adds.
The recovery took around two and a half hours. Donald Avenue was closed to traffic while it was underway.
RCMP are now investigating to determine exactly what happened.
