By Michael Bennett, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Ridgetown Independent News
John Wright had a summer home in Gander, NL. for many years, so he was used to hearing how residents rose to the occasion by taking in the hundreds of passengers from airplanes re-routed to the island province during 9/11.
But what Wright saw in residents from the Ridgetown and East Kent area in the Blizzard of Dec. 23-24 mirrored what happened in Gander back in those September days of 2001.
“There were so many people that went way over and above what was expected of them,” stated Wright. “The people in this town, (municipal) staff, EMS, fire, police … everybody.”
Wright said there were numerous examples of local residents going out of their way to assist strangers stranded in the blizzard-like conditions that exceeded all forecasts and virtually shut down Chatham-Kent two days before Christmas.
– Volunteers at the East Kent Memorial Arena, which was set up as a warming shelter for stranded motorists to wait out the storm;
– Residents supplied fuel so people stranded in cars could keep them running to stay warm;
– A local resident travelled through miserable conditions just to get a wheelchair for a woman at the warming station after she was rescued from a stuck vehicle but had to leave her wheelchair behind;
– Pierre Monette, the owner of Foodland, opened his store after-hours and manned the till himself so residents could get food;
– Local service clubs collected money and food to help stranded motorists;
– And the number of local residents who opened their homes to provide warmth, shelter and food to strangers.
“You got to give a lot of people credit for taking perfect strangers into their homes at Christmastime,” Wright said. “Nobody got left out in the cold. Everybody who needed help got help.”
“But that’s a small town for you,” he smiled.
The Highgate resident wore both his East Kent Councillor and his John and Kori Wright Towing hats during those harrowing pre-Christmas days, answering phone calls from antsy constituents while spending hours in the frigid conditions freeing vehicles on the 401 and other local roads.
“People were calling and wanting to know how long before their roads would get cleared,” Councillor Wright said. “The work crews were doing everything they could … but they (municipality) had to pull them off the road. There was no sense in having them out there. They would plow a section, and 20 minutes later, it would get blown right back in.”
Between Council duties and his tow truck service, Wright said he took about 670 phone calls over the five-day period.
“And I probably lost 200 calls,” Wright said. “You can’t do them all. You only have so many tow trucks and workers.”
As Wright, the tow-truck operator, his eight-man crew, along with the fleet of four wreckers and a tractor, worked through the worst of the storm, assisting a countless number of people stranded in their vehicles on the 401 and the local side roads that were impassible by the drifting and blowing snow.
With the forecast calling for blizzard-like conditions, Wright and his staff were well prepared for a long day that turned into a five-day adventure.
The Wright team was called to the eastbound 401 just west of Kent Road 15 around 8:30 a.m. for a multi-vehicle accident involving about a dozen transports and several passenger vehicles.
“The Ridgetown Howard Fire department and ambulances were already there attending to victims, so we started pulling the trucks and cars apart so we could get everybody behind it through because they were backed up all the way from Kent Bridge to (Highway) 40,” said Wright.
By 10 o’clock, a warming station was set up at the East Kent Arena as Wright’s trucks transported people from the 401 scenes into town.
“That’s when the storm started to get worse,” he said.
The Ontario Provincial Police shut down the 401 at that point, but some drivers ignored the closure, didn’t get off at Victoria Road as required, and then wound up stranded on the highway.
“You couldn’t see anything,” Wright said. “At one point, my truck was down the road, so I climbed in a firetruck with the guys from Ridgetown to get warmed up. It was just unreal.”
The crew stayed on the 401 scenes until about 5 o’clock when the OPP cleared the tow trucks from the scene and a second multi-vehicle crash close to Communication Road, where Chatham Towing attended.
After leaving the 401 scenes, Wright’s crews attended locations on the sideroads that night to clear vehicles, including towing an ambulance out of a drift on McLarty Line.
Wright made it back to his shop, about a kilometre from the 401, but couldn’t get to his home because the roads were plugged, so he made the decision he would spend the night at his friends Jen and Dave Vaughn’s house near the shop.
But just getting to his neighbour’s place was an adventure as the snow was blowing so hard he missed their driveway.
“I finally stopped and could see the light from their house behind me,” Wright said. “It just showed how easy you could get lost in those conditions.”
On the morning of Saturday, Dec. 24, conditions improved as the Wright crew returned to the 401 to clear the rest of the stranded transports. But when they got there, the transports were gone.
“I had a crane and rented a trailer to get the trucks off the highway, but everything was gone,” Wright said.
Apparently some tow truck operators from the Toronto area managed to drive into the closed portion of the 401 and towed the transports back to their areas.
“We lost eight tows and Chatham Towing six from their scene,” Wright said, as those Toronto operators cost the local towing firms upwards of $4,000 per tow.
The Wright wreckers headed to Victoria Road to attend to a number of vehicles that were still stranded on the road and in ditches.
“We were six hours between the McLarty and Selton and towed about 12 vehicles out,” said Wright. “It was slow going because they had a payloader to dig them out. We’d have to wait until they dug them out before we pulled them out and got them on a flatbed.”
The work continued in the wee hours of Christmas Day as the Wright crew got called out at one in the morning for a snowplow that got stuck on Orford Road – a four-hour job to get it free only to get called back later in the day when it got stuck again. There were a handful of other calls that day that Wright and his son Kori handled themselves.
“I tried to give the guys Christmas Day off,” Wright said.
On Boxing Day, the Wright team was on Kent Bridge Road, freeing vehicles as far north as the river and then to the east to Duart Line.
On the fifth day, they returned to Victoria Road and crossed the river to Jane Road near Thamesville to free more vehicles. Wright said his team towed between 50-60 vehicles during the five days.
“Worst I’ve seen since the winter of ‘77,” Wright described the storm of the 21st Century. “You have to give a lot of people credit for how they stepped up. And I have to give our staff a lot of credit for all the time they spent on the roads at Christmas when they would have loved to have been at home.”
“Hopefully, it’s something we won’t see again,” Wright ended.
