Highway Thru Hell

The winter season is already off to a hellish start when a major blizzard slams the Coquihalla Highway. Jamie Davis Heavy Rescue’s “A” team, Adam and Kevin, spends a busy morning clearing spun out semis off the road when word comes that a multi vehicle pile-up has closed down both northbound lanes. While Adam scrambles to get the highway open, Jamie tries to free a semi from a steep, icy off-ramp. By sundown the crew is exhausted, but the Coq isn’t done with them yet. At 3 AM, a five semi wreck at the top of the mountain sends Jamie and his 16-year-old son Brandon fighting their way through the traffic back-up. This is Brandon’s first night wreck – and the hard reality of heavy rescue towing is driven home when he discovers a driver under one of the trucks, dead.

A double-trailer load of lumber had flipped and spilled across a quarter mile of highway. Even with three heavy rescue trucks, Jamie’s crew doesn’t have enough equipment to do the job right. Adam is angry about the lack of equipment and the poor condition of his truck. Last year, Jamie ordered a state of the art heavy rescue truck called a Rotator. But the busy winter season is here and the custom-built wrecker still hasn’t been delivered. Just days before Christmas, Jamie heads to the factory in Tennessee to bring it home himself. While he’s gone, Adam has his hands full with the B team when a semi filled with expensive wine goes off a cliff.

Jamie’s having second thoughts about bringing his son Brandon onboard when the teenager spends his paycheck on ear piercings. Then his right hand man Kevin shows up to a wreck without the gear he needs to control traffic. When Jamie confronts him, Kevin storms off the job. Jamie’s one bright spot is his brand new truck, the Rotator. But even that lets him down when he’s called out to save a trailer stuck in a ditch, and only ends up destroying it. That night, as he heads up the Coq for a simple pull out job, he arrives to witness a snow plow skidding on black ice and slamming into two semis. It turns into a deep freeze all-nighter where Brandon finally redeems himself.

To keep up with a busy season, Jamie hires on a new guy, greenhorn driver Rob. When Rob turns out to be (to put it mildly) a slow learner - and then goes AWOL during a major blizzard – Jamie’s patience is pushed to the breaking point. When a reefer truck crashes over a bank, killing the driver, Jamie is forced to bring in a pick-up crew just to do the recovery. Before firing Rob, he decides to give him one last chance when a call comes in for a repo job.

Jamie isn’t the only tow guy on the Coq. Lone wolf Al Quiring is a tough as nails wrecker and Jamie’s main rival. Their dads’ did battle a generation ago, now Jamie and Al are fighting it out for the title -"King of the Coq". When the Rotator lands in the shop during an especially busy week, Al uses it as a chance to scoop a job off Jamie. Things get more complicated when one of Jamie's new drivers, from the city, learns a close buddy has nearly died in a towing accident during a snowstorm. Ken Monkhouse, heads to the hospital and comes face to face with the reality of the career he has chosen, and a buddy who has lost his leg.

Heavy snowfall has created avalanche conditions on the Coq. Plow crews are barely able to keep up. When traffic starts backing up in high-risk avalanche zones, highway authorities decide to close the road in both directions. A team of avalanche techs flies up the mountain in helicopters to drop concussion bombs and release the build-up, but bad weather hampers their first attempt. With the Coq closed overnight, trucks are using the back roads to get through. Jamie’s team is called out to recover a semi that went over the cliff on rural Highway 3. The next day is a battle on all fronts to get the Coq open - with helicopter teams dropping more bombs, highway crews faced with two feet of accumulation, and Jamie’s team forced to call in a second rotator.