16 • The Columbia Valley Pioneer
March 3, 2006
Today the placid, steaming waters of the Radium Hot Springs pool beckons to visitors.
Photo from Kootenay National Park
Crash was close call for swimmers in 1967 Victor Thygesen was a 20-year-old lifeguard when he lived firsthand the only deadly accident in the long history of the Radium Hot Springs. On May 3, 1967 he was a summer student at the hot pools when a tractor-trailer truck hauling gasoline went out of control and crashed a short distance up the highway from the hot pool parking lot. “Nobody knew what was happening - then all of a sudden, there was a wall of fire between us and the building,” said Mr. Thygesen, now 59, in a telephone interview from his home in Calgary. As the truck exploded, it caused two loud blasts. At first Mr. Thygesen thought work crews were doing some blasting, but after the second blast he knew something was wrong. “I saw a car headed up the highway stop, go on a few yards, then come racing back in reverse faster than I had ever seen a car travel in reverse before,” said Mr. Thygesen in an interview following the accident. “At the same moment I saw a cloud of black smoke and flames racing down the creek.” Burning gasoline poured from the tanker into Sinclair Creek, which runs beside the hot pool and under the facility’s stone building. Towering flames reported as high as 150 feet - turned the creek into a torrent of fire. As the fire raged, heat caused many of the building’s windows to shatter and a brush fire started on Redstreak Mountain, right behind the pools. “I could feel the heat all the way across the pool,” said Mr. Thygesen. In a written account Mr. Thygesen gave to staff at Kootenay National Park back in 1967, he said there were eight swimmers in the pool at the time of the ac-
cident. He called the swimmers toward the pool’s deep end and away from the fire, then helped to pull them out of the water and gathered them together behind a lifeguard shack.
Spilled fuel from truck created huge fire.
“I calmed a six-year-old boy and his mother under my jacket,” wrote Mr. Thygesen in his account. The pool acted as a buffer between the intense heat created by the towering flames and the trapped swimmers and two lifeguards who were on duty. After about 15 minutes of intense heat, the fire began to subside and Mr. Thygesen ordered everybody back into the pool. The swimmers stayed against the pool’s edge and moved toward the shallow end. The swimmers then got out and went into the building, across a wooden bridge where the fire had already been extinguished by Radium firefighters, and into the building which had suffered severe concrete and smoke damage. According to one witness: “I was on a ship that was torpedoed in 1940 and I was frightened then, but nothing like this.” The truck driver, Ernest Charles Mitchell, 32, was killed instantly. Surprisingly, nobody at the pool that day was badly hurt. “To my knowledge one woman was slightly burned and one stubbed her toes getting out of the pool,” wrote Mr. Thygesen in 1967. In his recent interview with The Pioneer, Mr. Thygesen said the accident was caused by the trucker losing his brakes on the steep mountain road. “And there were no runaway lanes in those days,” he said. A few years later Mr. Thygesen worked on a crew that built runaway lanes on the western side of the Sinclair Pass. “We got off pretty lucky; it could have been worse,” said Mr. Thygesen of the accident. “The only time I think about it is when I drive through there.”