When two vehicles collided on the Sea to Sky Highway on Tuesday night, a Squamish resident happened to be in one of the first few cars backed up from the site of the crash.
On Jan. 25, Paul Ryan and his friend were just returning from Bowen Island, where Ryan was doing a job as a construction contractor.
What they saw made them take action immediately.
A small car and a van had collided, and a fire had ignited, threatening to seriously harm the driver of the former vehicle.
By Ryan's account, people who'd stopped at the scene were looking for a means to open the car's door and rescue the driver.
Luckily, Ryan's job meant that he had a sledgehammer tucked away in his vehicle. With hammer in hand, he approached the scene.
"He was in the car, and I wasn't going to watch him burn, so I smashed his window," said Ryan.
"There's no way I was leaving him in there. No way."
Once Ryan broke the car's window, he rescued the driver with help from several other people.
"I undid the seatbelt and started pulling him out, and he kind of looked at me," he said.
"We had a moment. It was crazy. It was like he was very thankful that we got him out."
The timing was perfect too, Ryan said, as shortly after the driver was out of the vehicle, flames engulfed the car.
Ryan said that he, along with other people at the scene, also assisted the second driver involved in the collision, a woman who was driving the van.
The van was close to the fire, but, luckily the woman wasn't trapped in the vehicle, he said. The sledgehammer wasn't needed in this case.
"My sledgehammer broke, but that's OK, obviously," Ryan said with a chuckle.
Soon, police fire and ambulance personnel were on the scene.
The crash shut down the Sea to Sky Highway both ways between Porteau Cove and Lions Bay from about 5 p.m. until about 10:30 p.m.
The delay was in part because the RCMP's Integrated Collision Analysis and Reconstruction Service, or ICARS, was called to the scene to investigate.
ICARS is called to scenes when a serious crash occurs.
Squamish RCMP asks anyone with any information regarding the crash to contact the Squamish RCMP at 604-892-6100, or, contact Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS, or go to www.solvecrime.ca.
