When you get to the scene of an accident, and a life is at stake, what you have invested in training could be the difference between life and death.
Shon Crumley, owner/operator of Dakota Towing Ltd., didn’t plan to give a speech after winning WreckMaster of the Year at the 2023 Baltimore Tow Show, but when a story is this important, it just comes out.
“I don’t even know why I told that story, to be honest,” Shon said in an interview later. “I don’t remember talking or giving that speech, but that was a rescue I did with our local fire department that I’d never told anyone about. It’s a real hard one for me.”
Only three months before the rescue, Shon had a heart attack and was still recuperating. “I wasn’t supposed to be doing any sort of hard-core stuff. I was still on the mend,” he said. It was February, the middle of the night, and -64°C outside with windchill when the call came in.
“A local young fella had come around a corner on a gravel road, lost control, did a 180 onto a bridge deck, spun around, and hit the guard rail on the driver’s side,” said Shon. “We’re not sure if the window was open or if the window broke, but he was ejected out of the truck, out the driver’s window, and landed down—probably 50 feet or so—into a frozen creek bed. The truck flipped over the guard rail and landed upside down on top of him.
Originally published in
Tow Canada, March-April 2024
"It’s the most gut-wrenching feeling when you realize you might be the only chance that this person has to live.”
“So, we got the call for a single vehicle rollover with possible entrapment, and we responded,” said Shon. “I’m trained in heavy rescue and using the Jaws of Life with our fire department, so when a call like that comes in, I need to go because I’m trained. I thought, even though I’d just had my heart attack and it’s 2:30 in the morning, I better go. Ninety-nine percent of the time, it’s not actually what gets called in, but this one was.”
When Shon and his team arrived on the scene, they realized how bad the situation really was. “It was a Ford F-350 diesel truck, upside down, pancaked on top,” said Shon. “We started to try and get into the truck because the young fella was screaming for help, but our Jaws of Life wouldn’t start because they were frozen from driving out there.
“We are trained in the fire service that if your Jaws of Life don’t work, you go to electric tools. Well, we were too far for any electric tools to reach with extension cords, so we had to go to the last resort, which was hand tools. I started cutting the door off with a hacksaw, and I got the door off and started trying to tunnel my way into the truck to find a limb, a finger, a foot, or whatever to see where the driver was. The whole roof was pancaked right to the seat, and I couldn’t find him. I was bewildered by where this young fella was and then realized he was under the truck.
“We then had the task of trying to figure out how to get this truck off him without any tools we could use. We started digging the snow out from around the truck and finally got the Jaws of Life to start. I used them to lift the truck and pull the young fella out from underneath the truck. It took us an hour and 16 minutes in -64°C to get him out, into the ambulance, and on his way. We saved his life. He’s alive and well today, but it took me about a year to get over that job.”
Big and small, Dakota Towing Ltd. has done it all. The company is well equipped and trained to handle a wide range of recovery challenges.
As many in the towing and recovery industry have experienced, some jobs just stick with you, mentally or physically. In this case, for Shon, it was both.
“The hardest part about that whole job is we were then tasked with recovering the truck,” Shon said. “Remember, it’s -64°C outside, so we needed to have our trucks running and everything else, all the equipment. We had to dig out the snow so we could get to where we could dig the truck out of the creek.
“I had a hard time because it was a young fella from our town, and every time I went to the yard [afterwards], I relived that night and everything that I saw. I relived hearing him begging me not to let him die every time I saw the truck.
“There was an investigation that went into the job, so we had to keep the truck in our yard for about three months while they were investigating, and the insurance company scrutinized my bill,” Shon said. “They questioned every item, ‘Well, we don’t think we should pay for all those trucks sitting on the scene for this long,’ and I said, ‘It was -64°C; what do you want me to do? You want me to go back and forth 50 km, get another truck, and then come back when I need it?’ It was so frustrating, and I had to relive [the job] every time the adjustor scrutinized the charges. ‘We don’t think we should have to pay for a bobcat to be there that long,’ they said. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘we were on the job for eight hours, and I’m sorry, but the bobcat had to be there to clear snow as we were recovering the job.’
“The insurance company scrutinized my bill and shorted me about $2,600,” Shon said. “I finally got tired of it and said, ‘Whatever, just pay the bill.’ It was almost six months after the accident. ‘Just pay it,’ I said. ‘I’m done arguing. I don’t want to relive this anymore.’ They issued the payment that day.”
But that was not the end of the ordeal for Shon, “The next morning at 9 o’clock, they denied insurance coverage to the family and the young fella that had the accident and made the family pay the bill. The family was absolutely livid with me.
“They were mad at us because the insurance company kept telling them it was us that wouldn’t settle on the tow bill and that the tow recovery was just ‘astronomical’ (the word the insurance adjustor actually used to describe our invoice to the family). In a small town of 500 people, it doesn’t take long for people to start saying, ‘Guy took advantage of a bad situation,’ which I never did—I had to live with it for a year. It was one of those situations where you just wished you’d never answered the call.”
The tragedy here is that Shon and his team saved a young man’s life, but this is not how the towing industry is remembered after a recovery of this scale. “If there is anything about the story that I’d ever say, it’s that this is pretty much what society thinks of the towers,” Shon said.
One of the reasons Shon started his own towing company, Dakota Towing Ltd., is because he noticed that in the industry, the “customer” is often left out of customer service. He got into this industry because he genuinely wanted to help people. He trained with the fire department and earned his WreckMaster 8/9R certification because he believes you need the right tools and training to help those people.
“The whole time I did that recovery and rescue, I didn’t have a chance to put my turnout gear on,” said Shon. “I wasn’t dressed up. I was wearing my work pants that I’d worn the night before because they were right there and accessible. I didn’t have long underwear on. I just had work pants, a jacket, and regular gloves I’d grabbed out of my pick-up when I got on the scene, and I never stopped. The frostbite and the cold never got to me.
“But the worst part of the story was when we realized the young fella was underneath the truck. Sheer panic set in because you know you have the equipment on the towing side to handle this, but it’s not at your fingertips, and you’re sitting there, and it doesn’t matter how much is going on around you, in that moment, there is this eerie, most dead silence in your brain. And this is why I’m such an advocate for training because I just look at this moment, and it was probably after the second or third time the young fella had stopped calling for help, and I thought that he had died. It’s the most gut-wrenching feeling when you realize you might be the only chance that this person has to live because everyone else is so shell-shocked.
“Volunteer firefighting department in small, rural communities are diligent about training, but they are not in the towing industry,” Shon explained. “They don’t see what we see in the towing industry, so when this kind of horrific tragedy happens, it’s such a shock, and the brain goes into self-perseveration mode and protects itself from what it is seeing and hearing.
“At that moment, when he [the young fella] stopped calling for help and stopped screaming, and it was probably the third time that this had happened, and I was so alone and so isolated, and I just prayed, ‘Please, dear God, don’t let this boy die in my hands,’ and it was at that moment that all of the people who have ever trained me and given me any advice came to me, and my training just activated on how to deal with this. It was at that moment that I felt a hand on my back, and all I heard was, ‘Oh, you got some heartburn,’ The voice was Bruce Campbell’s1, a very dear friend of mine and a huge inspiration to me. I turned around and said, ‘What?’, and my fire chief was standing behind me, and he said, ‘I didn’t say anything.’
“And it was then that all the calculations, all the stuff that Bruce has ever taught, all that WreckMaster has ever taught, all the information about resistance and all the stuff from my fire training (and everything else like that), it all came to me. I just looked at my fire chief and said, ‘I need blocking—I need this, and I need this and this. Get it to me, let’s go! We gotta lift this truck!’ And it all started coming together.
“So, if anyone wants to tell me that training doesn’t pay off, here’s a story for them.”
This was not an easy story for Shon to tell, and not just once at the Baltimore tow show, but then again for Tow Canada. And we are grateful because this is a story that needs to be heard, not only by other towers who may undervalue training, but also by the general public, who will hopefully understand just how hard towers work to keep society moving.
During WreckMaster training, Bruce Campbell teaches students that if towers stopped doing their job, it would take just three days for cities to become gridlocked: no buying and selling, no getting emergency crews to accidents, and no getting to the hospital. Then there are the economic consequences to think about. The towing industry is vital to keeping society moving, yet respect and appropriate compensation are still hard to come by. This affects not only those already in industry but also deters fresh talent from coming in.
Shon is aware of all of this, and he is doing his best to do his part, not only by advocating for training in the industry, but also by stepping up as the new president of the Roadside Responders Association of Saskatchewan (RRAS). By working together with the most professional individuals in the industry, he hopes to improve conditions for all, and for him, this starts and ends with training.
Shon ended our interview by reflecting on his unscripted speech in Baltimore last fall. “For whatever reason, I just started telling the story when I got the [WreckMaster of the Year] award, and I never looked up the whole time,” he said. “Bruce was bugging me afterwards. He said, ‘When you started talking about a rescue, I thought you would get the old hook, but suddenly, you captivated the audience.’ I said, ‘I don’t know why I did it, but I felt it was important to say we need training. It’s so fundamental for our industry to be successful.’” 🍁