A family from Squamish, B.C., feels lucky to be OK after narrowly escaping a construction accident in the 1800 block of Hamilton Street.
Claire Johnstone was leaving her hotel and loading her young son into her car when, all of a sudden, a scaffold came crashing down next to her car on Aug. 11.
“It took me a second to realize that it was actually hitting the car. But it was so loud that as I was trying to reassure him, I was like, ‘wait, like is this OK?'” said Johnstone.
Johnstone says the car has a glass roof, and she saw there was metal, like a structure, and things hitting the car. She yelled at her husband, who was driving the car, to get away from the building.
“I didn’t have my seat belt on yet. So, I went over my son’s car seat because I was like, ‘what if this goes through?’ This felt like so long. Like my partner, felt like he took forever to put it in drive,” said Johnstone.
Johnstone said everyone in the car, including her mother and partner, was frantic.
“I felt like a sitting duck,” said Johnstone. “I was like, ‘what can we do?’ And which is why I covered my baby going like, ‘am I going to get impaled by something?’ Like you just feel so powerless.”
Johnstone said they parked the car and got out to see what happened when they safely got away.
“We saw that there’s two men that were basically hunched over like a railing. They were hooked in,” Johnstone recalled. She called to pedestrians on the street, saying to call 911, and someone else said they’d made the call.
Two men were injured in what police called “a workplace accident” in a news release on the afternoon of Aug. 11. That block of Hamilton Street was closed as police alongside occupational healthy and safety investigated.
However, Johnstone and her family left as they still needed to get to the hospital. The reason they were getting into the car in the first place was to get their son, Theo, checked out.
When they got to the hospital, Johnstone told her husband to check the Tesla footage.
“You see the metal landing on the back, I was completely shocked and I got really emotional because I was like, well, this could have landed on my baby that I was just holding,” said Johnstone.
“Then seeing that the brick landed the same second as I like as I’m closing the door, literally stuff is falling.”
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Johnstone said the entire thing was incredibly emotional for her.
“Because I was like, I was taking my son to the hospital because I thought something was wrong with him and it could have ended up with him not having a mom anymore,” said Johnstone.
Though her family was unharmed, Johnstone felt as if she cheated something.
“It’s like, one second of something different happening. Like when we got out, I was like, ‘oh, should we take the stroller? No, let’s leave the stroller.’ If I had taken the stroller, I would have to fold the stroller, put like everything [away],” said Johnstone.
Johnstone thought if they hadn’t parked exactly where they parked, the outcome may have been different.
“A huge brick fell on the front of the car, [the] hood and it flattened it, broke the lights. And then just behind, like a foot behind all the metal,” said Johnstone.
Johnstone said the incident has haunted her.
“I haven’t been sleeping super well since. I didn’t leave the apartment the first day and I didn’t want to come back from the hospital,” said Johnstone.
Johnstone said everyone is incredibly lucky, as nobody was killed.
She also looked back on her life after the accident, cherishing the moments she shared with her son.
“One thing that when I was like, ‘OK, is this the end’ is, I had no regrets, right? I was just like, ‘this is what I’ve been doing, is hanging out with him every second of every day for the last six months,'” she said.
“And yeah, if that had been the end, then I wouldn’t have been sad about that.”
