A rock slide hospitalized two people and forced a highway closure in the Okanagan Valley Sunday morning.
The slide sent large chunks of dirt and rocks tumbling into the highway from the mountainside, pushing concrete barriers out of the way. Two cars made it past the dust before the rocks came down into traffic in the area just north of Summerland. The debris covered the two southbound lanes of Highway 97 preventing vehicles from passing through.
An SUV driven by a couple from Alberta was hit by the rock slide on the highway that leads from Osoyoos to Vernon.
Chris Harbord, director of BC Ambulance Service, said two ambulances attended the scene around 11:30 a.m. and two seniors were taken to a Pentiction hospital with non life-threatening injuries.
Murray Tekano of the ministry of transportation said that an estimated 500 cubic metres of rock and dirt came down in the slide.
“We understand that a vehicle was impacted by the initial fall,” Tekano told CTV News.
“Highway 97 is a very busy provincial corridor and clearly on a weekend like today it’s that much more busy with recreational and summertime traffic, so it’s been quite heavy traffic today,” Tekano said.
Alternating one-lane traffic began moving past the rock slide early Sunday afternoon. Geo-technicians were on the scene Sunday evening to determine the cause of the slide.
With a report from CTV Vancouver’s Alex Turner
