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Mom and Son drown in car
The Star Story
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Mom, son drown in car
Canal relocation delayed by red tape
Feb. 6, 2006. 07:03 AM
JIM WILKES
STAFF REPORTER
Terror-stricken Cassandra Read screamed into her cellphone and begged a 911 emergency operator for help as her SUV drifted and sank into the icy waters of a canal near Bradford north of Toronto Saturday night.
But the 32-year-old Keswick woman and her 4-year-old son drowned before rescuers could find the submerged Toyota 4Runner and pull it to the surface.
"I can't even imagine the terror they would have gone through, totally submerged in water, dark, where you can't see anything," said Acting Sergeant Paul Heshka of South Simcoe police.
"Especially with a little guy like that, I just can't imagine how awful that would have been."
Bradford West Gwillimbury Mayor Frank Jonkman said town officials have tried unsuccessfully for more than a decade to get approval and funding from senior government levels to shift the canals and create a land buffer between them and the road.
"We've spent over a million dollars on studies and engineering to do this and we're no closer to getting started on it than we were five years ago," he said. "Now we have two people dead."
There have been 19 deaths in the canals in the past 52 years, he said, including a man who drove his car off the road two years ago.
In the latest tragedy, police, fire and other emergency services scoured the inky black scene for traces of Read's car, which drifted about 40 metres downstream before it sank along Canal Rd., about 2 kilometres east of Highway 400, shortly after 7 p.m.
Divers and a small fireboat finally located the SUV about 20 minutes later, but it appeared too late to save Read and her son, Taylor Grasby.
Rescuers worked frantically, however, to resuscitate them. They were rushed to Southlake hospital in Newmarket, but emergency staff was unable to revive them.
Saturday's accident has devastated Read's family and friends, her mother said yesterday.
"It's just terrible," Brenda Read said outside her daughter's home. "She did such a good job raising Taylor all by herself."
Family friends said the boy's father died a couple of years ago.
Read said her daughter had spent the day at a flea market in St. Jacobs, just north of Kitchener, and was returning home when the accident happened.
"She phoned me when she got out of Orangeville on Highway 9 and she said the roads were bad," Read recalled.
"I said to her, `Just put your truck in four-wheel drive and keep your foot off the gas and get off the cellphone so you can concentrate on driving.'
"I said, `Give me a call when you get home or at least when you get into Keswick to let me know you're okay.'
"I never heard from her again."
Canal Rd. is often used by locals as a shortcut from Keswick and south Bradford to Highway 400 and is busy weekday mornings and evenings with Toronto commuters.
The road was originally built in the 1930s atop a dike separating the canals from the fertile Holland Marsh to service adjacent farms. Jonkman said it was never designed to handle the heavy traffic it now gets.
Dan Vander Kooi, 44, has lived across from the crash site for 11 years and has seen other accidents on the road, including one where the car was prevented from entering the water because it hit a tree.
"We're used to the road, so we learn to live with it," he said. "We don't give much thought to how dangerous it is."
Art Janse, the town's drainage superintendent, said there have been many close calls over the years, including an accident last summer when another woman and child went into the canal in a car.
"But she managed to get out before it sunk," Janse said.
Jonkman said Saturday's accident appears to be the result of bad road conditions, which were icy and slushy even though a plow had been through the area earlier in the evening.
"There have been a lot of people gone into the canal," he said.
"A lot of them have gone in on account of their own fault, from drinking or driving too fast.
"This certainly was not the case with this one, I don't believe."
He said the town would press ahead with plans to relocate the canal first proposed in 1993.
"We keep running into obstacles from government ministries," he said.
Shifting the dike would cost about $18 million and put a 20-metre land buffer between the water and the road.
Janse said it would cost $4.5 million to install guardrails along the road, but called the measure a temporary stopgap because the peat that the road is built atop isn't stable enough to hold the railings in place.
"It's just as cheap to build a new canal as to clean this one out," Janse said, explaining the canals haven't been dredged since Hurricane Hazel in 1954, when town officials widened the canals, bringing them closer to the road.
"But we got into bureaucracy, after bureaucracy, after bureaucracy," he said.
"Government red tape is costing lives."
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BE CAREFUL DRIVING IN THIS AREA PEOPLE!!!
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