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A 29-year-old woman from Fernie, B.C., has been charged with five counts of dangerous driving causing bodily harm in connection with an accident last year in which a motorhome driving the wrong way on West Vancouver’s Highway 1 crashed head-on into a passenger car and caused a chain reaction involving several other vehicles.
Charges were sworn against Alexandra Georgson Nov. 22 in North Vancouver provincial court. Georgson is scheduled to make a court appearance Dec. 13.
Six people were rushed to hospital, two of them in critical condition, on Sept. 21, 2022, after the crash near the Cypress Bowl Road exit.
People in two other cars swerved at the last minute to get out of the way, ending up in the ditch or next to the median.
One witness said on social media that her husband had a split second to swerve as they saw what she described as a van “roaring full speed in the wrong lane on Highway 1 near Taylor Way.”
There was no time to warn anyone and the car just behind them was hit and “flew through the air,” the woman wrote.
Miraculously, one of the people who was in that car posted on social media hours later to say both he and his brother were OK.
“At any moment your life can just end,” he wrote. “Today me and my brother dodged death after a person driving on the wrong side of the highway hit us! We flew [through] the air and rolled about 4-5 times can’t believe we’re alive.
Matt Furlot, assistant fire chief of the West Vancouver Fire Department, described arriving on the scene last September to find a camper van on top of another vehicle with smoke coming from the vehicle.
Bystanders had already pulled the injured driver of the motorhome out of the vehicle.
Miraculously, the driver of the vehicle partially crushed by the motorhome walked away from the scene with only minor injuries.
Due to the serious nature of the incident, members of the Integrated Collision Analysis and Reconstruction Service (ICARS) attended and took control of the scene.
Police did not give any information about why the driver of the motorhome is believed to have been driving the wrong way on the highway at the time.
