In Prince George, B.C., thousands of people used to watch the Sandblast
WARNING: This article has graphic video of people getting hurt at a sand-skiing competition.
People looking for excitement in Prince George, B.C., have been throwing themselves down the Nechako River cutbanks in the summer for more than 30 years.
First on alpine skis, then on snowboards, and finally on mountain bikes, they were brave enough to take on Prince George’s most obvious geographical feature: a 60-degree sand and gravel bank made by melting glaciers that filled the Nechako and Fraser rivers thousands of years ago.
The event was called Sandblast, and the goal was to be the first to reach the bottom.
But on August 16, 2003, after 32 years of pranks and chaos, it all came to an end.
On that sunny Saturday, three people were riding an old, heavy sofa on bicycle wheels, but they didn’t have any steering or brakes, so it went off the east side of the course and slammed into two people sitting on a hill.
That was the second year of Sandblast’s “furniture category,” and the incident was so scary and serious that it ended the event for good. Sandblast stopped happening because it cost too much to insure.
The last Sandblast was put together by Neal Hagreen. Twenty years later, he says that he wishes he hadn’t let the couch roll down the hill.
Hagreen told CBC News from his home in Kelowna, “Looking back, it was missing a few pieces.” “Up until that point, it had been a great day.”
‘Oh my God
The people riding on the couch were Eric Leach, Jonathan Dyrblom, and Shawn Burleigh. The 1970s-style sofa starts running at an angle almost as soon as the video of it going down the hill, which is still on the internet. As it gets closer to the finish line, which is about 20 meters from the bottom, it turns more sharply and heads toward three people who are sitting on the side of the finish line.
Without a protective fence, one person is able to get out of the way at the last second, but five-year-old Meara Morse and 20-year-old Julie Middleton are killed. Middleton throws herself on top of Morse to protect her, but the couch hits them hard, tips forward, and flips. When it flips, Leach, Dyrblom, and Burleigh go flying through the air and land in the hay bales at the bottom to protect themselves. The couch, which is now rolling end over end, hits them with a horrifying force a second later.
On the video, you can hear a person at the bottom saying “Oh my God” over and over as the event is happening.
WARNING: This video has violent scenes.
According to a story in the Prince George Citizen newspaper from August 18, 2003, Leach got hurt in the back and broke his nose, while Dyrblom may have gotten a concussion. Burleigh, Morse, and Middleton, who was volunteering as a medical assistant at Sandblast, were all hurt in ways that were not clear.
The Citizen said that all five people were taken to the hospital, but by the next day they were all back home.
Some of the people involved in the accident could not be reached, even though people tried.
But Lori Nelson, a former Sandblast competitor who saw the crash and knows both Middleton and Morse, told CBC that Morse had a serious head injury.
A heart-pounding experienc
Sandblast has been around since 1972. In a city like Prince George, where winter is always around, it was a way for downhill skiers to get their adrenaline fix in the summer. The event took place in the third week of August, and people raced down the cutbanks against each other.
Casey Johnson, who lives in Prince George, skied in Sandblast for 18 years and told CBC that it was always an exciting time.
He said, “It’s not like regular skiing.” “It starts out as sand and then turns into coarse gravel… Once you hit the gravel, your speed really picks up, and you’re in the ditch at the bottom in a matter of seconds, so you have to find a way to stop fast.”
Johnson said that before a Sandblast run, his heart would always be racing, and “that rush in the starting gate was so cool and made you want to come back.”
The crowd kept coming back as well. During its peak, Sandblast was known to draw up to 5,000 people.
The event became so well-known that the most famous ski and snowboard filmmaker in the world, Warren Miller, came to Prince George in the late 1990s to film the action and spectacular falls.
Sandblast changed with the times, and when snowboarding and mountain biking became popular, there were new categories for them.
A story from the Prince George Free Press in 2001 said that the Sandblast of that year was when a couch showed up on the hill. The newspaper said that Steve Bartkowski, Jerid Letchford, and Ken Smith put skis on the bottom of a sofa and rode it down.
Because of this, the Sandblast organizers added a furniture category in 2002, and it was still there in 2003.
Cost of insurance soare
Hagreen, who has also done Sandblast a dozen times, told CBC that he wasn’t worried about the event’s future right after the couch accident in 2003. Instead, he said that he was worried about the five people who had been in the crash.
But in the end, it didn’t happen because the insurance coverage for a 2004 Sandblast went up a lot. Hagreen said that he would have had to pay about $8,000. This is up from $1,700 in 2003.
“So that was obviously out of reach at the time,” he said.
A preventable acciden
Hagreen said that a speed gun on the couch that day in 2003 showed that it was moving at “more than 80 kilometers per hour” when it hit the hay bales at the bottom.
“Realistically, a unit like that with wheels should have never been allowed to go down the hill,” he said, thinking back on the situation.
Nelson, on the other hand, is still upset by what she saw 20 years ago.
“Meara and Julie are… It makes you feel… “That couch really hurt them,” she said, her voice shaking.
Nelson said the accident could have been avoided if the people on the sides of the course had been told to move off the hill before the furniture category started.
Most likely, sandblast will stay buried
Sandblast hasn’t been heard from in twenty years. Hagreen thinks it won’t happen again, and not just because insurance is so expensive.
He told CBC that it was already hard in the early 2000s to find enough volunteers to keep it going, especially people to take on leadership roles, and that the problem didn’t go away after 2003.
Hagreen said that after 2003, people would ask him for help bringing the event back, and he would help them. But because no one was willing to take charge, he said, the talks never got anywhere.
When asked if the thing that happened at Sandblast 2003 stuck with him for a while, Hagreen said, “People expected that kind of crazy from me… I was at the top of the list of crazy people.”
Hagreen has worked as a safety coordinator in Kelowna for about 10 years.
Considering his background, he knows that his current job is funny.
“There are two ways to learn: either by doing it or by reading about it,” he said.
“I’ve never learned by the book.”