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Aug 20, 2023

It's been 20 years since a couch crash ended a sand

WARNING: This story contains graphic descriptions of injuries at a sand-skiing event. This story was updated at 6 p.m. on Aug. 13 to include comment from one of the injured spectators and the mother

WARNING: This story contains graphic descriptions of injuries at a sand-skiing event.

This story was updated at 6 p.m. on Aug. 13 to include comment from one of the injured spectators and the mother of the other injured spectator.

For more than three decades, thrill-seekers in Prince George, B.C., hurled themselves down the summertime slope of the Nechako River cutbanks.

First on alpine skis, and later on snowboards and mountain bikes, they dared challenge Prince George's most visible geographic feature — a 60-degree sand and gravel bank formed thousands of years ago by the melting glacial ice sheets that filled the Nechako and Fraser rivers.

The event was called Sandblast, and it was a harrowing exercise of fastest-to-the-bottom wins.

But on Aug. 16, 2003 — in its 32nd year of follies and mayhem — it all came to a crashing halt.

On that sunny Saturday, an old, bulky sofa raised up on bicycle wheels — but with no steering or brakes to give its three riders control — veered off the east side of the course and slammed at ever-increasing speed into two young spectators sitting on the hill.

The accident left the young spectators with permanent injuries and their families with other, less visible scars that still haunt them 20 years later.

"I started to panic and never stopped since," said Andrine Morse, whose five-year-old daughter and a close family friend were struck by the couch.

That year was the second of a Sandblast "furniture category," and the incident was scary enough and serious enough that it marked the end of the event altogether. Sandblast became too expensive to insure, and hasn't happened since.

Neal Hagreen organized the last Sandblast. Two decades later, he says he regrets allowing the couch to go down the hill.

"In hindsight, yeah, it was missing a few components," Hagreen told CBC News from his home in Kelowna. "It was a great day up until that point."

Eric Leach, Jonathan Dyrblom and Shawn Burleigh were the riders on the couch. In video footage that still survives on the internet, the 1970s-style sofa starts running at an angle almost immediately, instead of straight down the hill.

As it is approaching the finish line, located about 20 metres from the bottom, it turns more dramatically and puts itself on a collision course with three people sitting off to the side at the finish.

With no protective fence in place, Morse's oldest son sweeps her middle son and two other kids away, but two others — five-year-old Meara Morse and 20-year-old volunteer medic Juli Middleton — aren't able to get out of the way in time. Middleton throws herself on top of Morse in an effort to protect her, but the couch hits them at full force, pitches forward and flips.

When it flips, it sends Leach, Dyrblom and Burleigh cartwheeling through the air, all the way into the protective hay bales at the bottom. The couch, now tumbling end over end, catches up to them a moment later with horrifying impact.

On the video, a person at the bottom can be heard saying, "Oh my God" repeatedly as the incident is occurring.

According to coverage in the Aug. 18, 2003, edition of the Prince George Citizen newspaper, Leach ended up with a back injury and a broken nose, while Dyrblom suffered a suspected concussion. Burleigh had undetermined injuries. All three were released from the hospital by the following day.

Morse and Middleton, however, were permanently injured, leaving the Morse family "shattered," said Andrine Morse.

The top of Meara's scalp was ripped nearly completely off her head, leaving her with a large scar and a life-long injury.

Middleton, meanwhile, suffered a severe concussion, multiple fractures on her left side, including her clavicle, and has permanent hearing loss in her left ear, chronic pain and some short-term memory problems.

"I struggle physically, mentally, and emotionally with the trauma of that day, to this day, and it ultimately led to me ending my military career as a medic early," Middleton said in a statement to CBC News.

Hagreen said a speed gun on the couch that day in 2003 indicated it was moving at "upwards of 80 kilometres an hour" when it hit the hay bales at the bottom.

"Realistically, a unit like that with wheels should never have been allowed to go down the hill," he said, looking back on the incident.

Former sandblast competitor Lori Nelson, meanwhile, is still shaken by what she saw, even 20 years later.

"Meara and Juli … it's emotional … they really took a hard hit by that couch," she said, her voice shaking.

Nelson said the accident could have been prevented if the people scattered along the sides of the course had been instructed to move off the hill before the furniture category started.

Morse doesn't blame anyone for the incident, but says it still "haunts" her and her family.

She has suffered frequent panic attacks and has been diagnosed with post-traumatic-stress disorder, co-morbid panic disorder and agoraphobia, with a specific fear of crowds.

Sandblast dates back to 1972. In a winter city like Prince George, it was a way for downhill skiers to get their shot of summertime adrenaline. The event was held in the third week of August and saw competitors race head-to-head down the cutbanks.

Prince George resident Casey Johnson skied in Sandblast for 18 years and told CBC it was always an exhilarating experience.

"It's not like regular skiing," he said. "It's a combination of sand at the top, which then turns into a coarse gravel … and once you hit the gravel your speed really picks up, and then within seconds you're at the ditch [at the bottom] and you have to find a way to stop quickly."

Johnson said his heart was always pounding when he was about to make a Sandblast run, and "that rush in the starting gate was so cool and made you come back."

The spectators kept coming back, too. In its heyday, Sandblast was known to attract as many as 5,000 people.

The event gained such notoriety that Warren Miller, the world's most famous ski and snowboard filmmaker, came to Prince George in the late 1990s to document the action and the spectacular spills.

Sandblast changed with the times, and that meant the addition of snowboard and mountain bike categories when those pursuits became popular.

According to a 2001 story in the Prince George Free Press, that year's Sandblast marked the appearance of a couch on the hill. The newspaper reported that participants Steve Bartkowski, Jerid Letchford and Ken Smith mounted some skis to the bottom of a sofa and rode it down.

That prompted organizers to officially add a furniture category in 2002, and it remained part of Sandblast in 2003.

Hagreen — who also participated in Sandblast a dozen times — told CBC he wasn't worried about the future of the event in the immediate aftermath of the 2003 couch accident. Instead, he said he was focused on the welfare of the five people involved in the crash.

But, as it turned out, a hefty increase in insurance coverage for a 2004 Sandblast kept it from happening. Hagreen said the out-of-pocket cost would have been about $8,000, up from $1,700 in 2003.

"So obviously that was out of reach at the time," he said.

Sandblast has been silent for two decades now. In Hagreen's opinion, it won't happen again, and not just because of the cost of insurance.

He told CBC that finding enough volunteers to keep it going — especially people to step into leadership roles — was already becoming difficult in the early 2000s, and that the problem persisted in the years following 2003.

Hagreen said for close to a dozen years after 2003, people would contact him about reviving the event and he would offer his help. But, with nobody willing to take the lead, he said the discussions never went anywhere.

When asked if the incident at Sandblast 2003 got attached to his name for a while afterward, Hagreen said: "People expected that kind of craziness from me … I was definitely at the very top of the crazy group."

Hagreen has been in Kelowna for about 10 years now and works as a safety co-ordinator.

Given his background, he realizes the irony of his current occupation.

"You can learn one of two ways: you can learn on the ground, or you can learn by the book," he said.

"I never learned by the book."

Jason Peters is a journalist based in Prince George, B.C., on the territory of the Lheidli T'enneh. He can be reached at [email protected].