'Very grateful': Good Samaritans help stranded commuters during B.C. snowstorm
Good Samaritans came to the aid of commuters during the harrowing snowstorm that rocked B.C.’s Lower Mainland Tuesday night.
For Alisha and Carl DeLeon, it was a night filled with distress as they both attempted to make it back to their North Delta home.
For Alisha, who is 36 weeks pregnant, her drive from New Westminster took 10-and-a-half hours.
"Really uncomfortable and the unknown is frustrating,” Alisha, who was stuck near the Queensborough Bridge told CTV News.
“I tried to look up some information on how long I might be there,” she said.
“We have two other kids here too so we weren’t sure when we’d be able to come home to them,” she added.
Meanwhile, her husband Carl was stuck in his own vehicle up near the Alex Fraser Bridge.
DeLeon says she had run out of food, causing her blood sugar to drop, creating an even direr situation.
However, she says at around 1:30 a.m. some Good Samaritans came to the rescue.
"They hopped over the meridian and were handing out tea and desserts to cars who had been sitting there a long time,” Alisha said, adding the gesture was "very helpful."
For Carl, who waited anxiously for his wife's arrival after he finally got home after 1 a.m., the kind act certainly isn’t going unnoticed.
"We just really want to say thank you to them whoever they are and for whatever reason they did that,” he said. “It was really a blessing for us because that could have been a much worse night,”
Meanwhile, a Sikh temple in Richmond also stepped up, letting hundreds of stranded commuters stay the night.
Among them was Rajveer Bhatti, who was stuck on a busy bus for hours.
“Phones were dying, people started panicking,” she told CTV News.
Bhatti said she thought about trying to get an Uber, but decided to join others on the bus who made the 15- minute walk to the nearby Nanaksar Gurdwara Gursikh Temple.
"They provide us a hot drink, they provided us a phone charger so we can connect our phones to call our parents and inform our families,” Bhatti said.
She says they were also provided with a hot meal and a place to sleep.
“That was kind, we were very grateful they did all of that hospitality for us,”
CTVNews.ca Top Stories
Why wasn't the suspected Chinese spy balloon shot down over Canada?
Critics say the U.S. and Canada had ample time to shoot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon as it drifted across North America.

Survivors scream as desperate rescuers work in Turkiye, Syria
Rescue workers and civilians passed chunks of concrete and household goods across mountains of rubble Monday, moving tons of wreckage by hand in a desperate search for survivors trapped by a devastating earthquake.
Rescuers scramble in Turkiye, Syria after quake kills 3,400
A powerful 7.8 magnitude earthquake rocked wide swaths of Turkiye and neighbouring Syria on Monday, killing more than 2,600 people and injuring thousands more as it toppled thousands of buildings and trapped residents under mounds of rubble.
New details emerge ahead of Trudeau-premiers' health-care meeting
As preparations are underway for the anticipated health-care 'working meeting' between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Canada's premiers on Tuesday, new details are emerging about how the much-anticipated federal-provincial gathering will unfold.
The world's deadliest earthquakes since 2000
A magnitude 7.8 earthquake shook Turkiye and Syria on Monday, killing thousands of people. Here is a list of some of the world's deadliest earthquakes since 2000.
Quebec minister 'surprised' asylum seekers given free bus tickets from New York City
Quebec's immigration minister says she was 'surprised' to learn the City of New York is helping to provide free bus tickets to migrants heading north to claim asylum in Canada.
opinion | Don Martin: Alarms going off over health-care privatization? Such an out-of-touch waste of hot political air
The chances Trudeau's health-care summit with the premiers will end with the blueprint to realistic long-term improvements are only marginally better than believing China’s balloon was simply collecting atmospheric temperatures, Don Martin writes in an exclusive column for CTVNews.ca, 'But it’s clearly time the 50-year-old dream of medicare as a Canadian birthright stopped being such a nightmare for so many patients.'
'Buildings are broken': Calgary man in Turkiye describes disaster scene post-earthquake
Calgarians at home and abroad are reeling in the wake of a massive earthquake that struck a war-torn region near the border of Turkiye and Syria.
U.S. 6-year-old who shot teacher allegedly tried to choke another
A 6-year-old Virginia boy who shot and wounded his first-grade teacher constantly cursed at staff and teachers, chased students around and tried to whip them with his belt and once choked another teacher 'until she couldn't breathe,' according to a legal notice filed by an attorney for the wounded teacher.