Olympic Coins strewn as Mint truck crashes
At about 8 pm Thursday, a truck carrying commemorative coins for the Royal Canadian Mint plunged 40 feet off Savona Hill on the TransCanada Highway near Kamloops.
The driver was lucky for two reasons: first, he was alive, and second, he avoided an even-steeper 1,000-foot drop into nearby Kamloops Lake.
Black Press employee Dave Blair was the only person to stop to assist the crash victims, helping the driver pull his passenger from the sleeper toward the back of the rig.
Blair said he had to scramble up a four-foot pile of money to get into the truck's cab.
"It was definitely the biggest pile of money I'd ever seen – and was so loose it was spreading around every step you took."
"I've never been on top of so much money in my life," he said.
"I didn't know it was money because it was pitch dark. But once I got my flashlight, we knew.
"We didn't take any, but we sure were tempted," he said with a laugh.
Police arrived 20 minutes later.
The truck was carrying the "snowboarder" commemorative coin, issued by the mint to promote the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver.
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