Jeremy Allen has been stranded on Highway 99 before. He estimates it has happened three or four times over the years, sometimes for so long he ended up sleeping in his car on the shoulder, waiting for the road to open. But when a fatal motorcycle crash near Deeks Creek Bridge shut the highway down in both directions on the evening of July 5, leaving himself stranded in Vancouver, he had an idea.
Allen owns Squamish Water Taxi, a small commercial marine operator on Howe Sound. Within about fifteen minutes of putting out a message offering to help, his phone started ringing. Ten calls came in. Fifteen minutes after that, it was forty, plus dozens of text messages, from people trying to get home to Bowen Island, get to work, or healthcare workers trying to get to work.
“It was insane,” Allen said.
Allen’s boat had actually been pulled out of the water the day before. He didn’t end up running it that night, since darkness was falling quickly and there wasn’t a clear enough emergency to justify it, but he kept a captain on call from a hotel room in case that changed. The experience, he said, was a wake up call.
“We’ve got to keep this in the water just in case stuff like this happens,” he said.
It never went anywhere Sunday night, but the volume of calls made the demand for an emergency service to transport supplies or medical personnel impossible to ignore for Allen.
Allen sent a letter to Transportation Minister Mike Farnworth and his staff, laying out a formal proposal for an on-call, cost-recovery marine response contract that the province could activate during full Highway 99 closures.
The proposal is built in tiers. The first, available immediately, uses Allen’s 19-foot RIB to move urgent medical transport, doctors, nurses and essential workers, and to run water, food, blankets and sleeping bags out to people stranded along the shoreline.
As Highway 99 runs close to Howe Sound for much of its length, he said the boat could reach nearly any point along the closure. The second tier centres on a 25-passenger water taxi Allen’s company already has on order, which he envisions running continuous evacuation loops once it arrives in a few months. The third and broadest tier would see Squamish Water Taxi coordinate with other marine operators in the Sea to Sky to build a round the clock emergency response network for the whole corridor.
Routes would flex to wherever the closure is, Allen said, from Squamish to Horseshoe Bay, Porteau Cove to Horseshoe Bay, or any other accessible stretch. Passengers would leave their vehicles behind under existing traffic management, and Allen has proposed a no-tow, no-ticket grace period until noon the following day so people can return for their cars once the highway reopens. Priority would go to medical cases, essential workers and families with young children and seniors, then everyone else still waiting to get home.
Allen is careful not to oversell his own company’s role in it.
“We’re just a water taxi business. We’re nothing special. It doesn’t need to be us. It can be anybody,” he said. He said he has already spoken informally with other marine operators in the corridor who do similar work and believes they would help if called on. He estimates that if several boat operators pooled their resources, they could move as many as 500 people up and down the corridor within two to three hours.
As for risk, Allen said rough water on Howe Sound is something his crews train for and deal with regularly. Conditions the night of the crash, he said, were calm.
While the ministry has received his proposal, Allen hasn’t got an official response yet. Allen said he plans to follow up and hopes for a real conversation with ministry or emergency management staff. He says he can immediately provide officials with vessel specs, Transport Canada certification, insurance details and cost structures.
Whether or not the province decides to fund it “we’re still going to run it,” he said. “We’re going to help people no matter what, even from our own pockets.”
