By John Francis,
Bruce Peninsula Press
“It was a dark and stormy night,” as Snoopy’s stories always began.
For the second time in six years, a car drove into the water at Tobermory boat launch. On Thursday, Oct 14, around 7:30PM, Nikk LaFontaine was in the Electric Woodpecker getting a tattoo, when a car drove past, going the wrong way up Bay Street past the cenotaph. She watched as it turned right instead of left at the corner in front of Peacocks Foodland and disappeared behind Craigie’s Restaurant. Moments later she saw flashing lights.
As with the previous incident in the spring of 2016, it was a person unfamiliar with Tobermory entering the village on a rainy night. With poor visibility and everything glistening from the rain, the drivers missed or misunderstood the turn in front of Craigie’s Restaurant and ended up in the harbour. This time, the victim was a man in his 60s, from Guelph, Ontario.
There are no lines painted on the roadway to lead traffic around the corner and there is no checkerboard or other signage to indicate a 90° turn. You just have to know.
Mandy Liverance was at a staff meeting and debrief at the Crowsnest after a day of year-end cleaning in the pub. She stepped out on the deck and heard someone yelling for help. She and Brier Newton ran out onto the street. “It was really dark and raining heavily,” Liverance recalls. “We couldn’t see him but we followed the yells” — down to the boat launch, where they found a submerged car and a man clinging to the wall of the harbour, unable to pull himself out. They each grabbed one hand and hauled the man up onto the boardwalk. He was shocked, exhausted and a little confused, but in good humour. Had he been drinking? “Not at all,” Liverance said. “Visibility was the big thing,” she continued, “and a lot of the streetlights are out”.
Harbourmaster Carla Watson echoes Mandy Liverance’s observations. Alerted about the accident by bystanders, Watson came down to the harbour Friday evening “to take a look — and when I was down there, it was terribly dark.” The harbour has a camera monitoring the boat launch area, but when Watson checked the footage she found the rain was heavy but you could still see the car driving into the harbour. He was, she said, going much too fast for conditions, but not faster than the speed limit.
She had a chance to speak to the vehicle driver on Friday evening. He told her that when it entered the water, the car swung around and flipped driver’s side down so he had to climb out the passenger side door.
The car didn’t stay in the harbour for long — later that evening, divers hooked a cable to the undercarriage and a towtruck pulled it out.
The vehicle’s tailgate came open at some point and a lot of the contents were floating in the harbour the next morning. They were retrieved by Ken Barby in a wetsuit and snorkel, aided by personnel from Blue Heron Tours.
Harbourmaster Watson feels strongly that something needs to be done to prevent a third (or fourth or fifth…) incident. “These people are not stupid and they weren’t drunk,” she says — they just found the conditions and visibility prevented them from seeing that the road turned 90°. There should be lines painted on the road, she believes. There should probably be a gate across the mouth of the boat launch. As an interim measure, she will be winding the posts on either side with reflective tape, but she would like something more obtrusive as well. We can’t let this happen again.
As we are talking on the phone on the morning of Oct 18, it’s a lovely sunny day. Watson is watching the boat launch camera. “I don’t believe it”, she says. “A white car nearly went in, right now — barely got stopped before it got to the water.”
She reiterates: “Something needs to be done”.
