Highway Thru Hell is a Canadian reality TV show that started airing in 2010. This show tells the adventures of Jamie Davis and his team who are specialized in rescuing travelers and accident victims on the Coquihalla Highway. This highway is a 201-mile road that joins Vancouver and the Canadian Rockies and it is where a majority of the show is filmed.
Jamie and his team deal with heavy rescue ops, especially during winter where the weather can be extremely dangerous and is a major cause of accidents on this road. This show has had a long-run success and currently airs its seventh season with a large audience across the world. Below are the top 10 craziest happenings from the show.
10 Beating Gravity
"The everyday experience that comes with this job makes it interesting," said Boyd, who was one of the rescuers of a truck accident that occurred on this highway. Al Quiring and Gord Boyd were the brains behind this rescue operation. The question that begs to be answered is what happened?
On getting to the site of the accident, they found a loaded truck on the edge of a three hundred foot drop. With the help of their equipment, they were able to pull off the rescue but this became the scariest mission they ever went on. The operation shows that no matter how much balance you find, you can not always oppose gravity.
9 Flaming Truck
Colin Mclean, a crew member, said this event was one of the worst wrecks he has worked on since he started towing. This event made the show live up to its name because it featured a high degree of fire and heat. The accident occurred on Highway 881 in Alberta and showed a collision that occurred between a tanker loaded with gasoline and a large logging truck. The aftermath resulted in heat and flame which took Jamie and his crew a long time to dowse. The accident resulted in the death of a driver who collided with the log truck but both the gasoline truck and log truck drivers survived.
8 Canyon Wreck Mystery
Fraser Canyon is one of the most used sites for movie shootings because it is very picturesque. Aside from this, it is well known for accidents and dangerous crashes. Being one of the most beautiful canyons in the world, it begins above Williams Lake in British Colombia. The twist is that Jamie Davis and his crew don’t get to see the beauty much and deal with the ugly side most of the time. Their job in retrieving crashed vehicles does mean they get to rescue many people alive, but it also means they have to bring up the people who perished. This job isn’t for the soft-hearted.
7 Chicken on Ice
One of the most unusual encounters of Jamie and his team occurred in the fifth episode of the second season. The team was called in to help in the rescue of a truck full of frozen chickens. Quiet unusual right? Yes, this event was one of their craziest experiences on this highway. The truck crashed into the trees along the road, causing the truck to turn over, lying sideways in the forest. One notable event that occurred in this episode was the clear evidence that the health of one of Jamie’s team members, Bruce Hardy, was failing. He was 65-years old at the time.
6 Missing Truck Driver
On an episode of Highway Thru Hell back in 2017 they aired one of their most intense rescue operations. The story featured a man who was found trapped inside his truck after he had been missing for two days. Jamie Davies and his crew members were the first people at the scene and carried out their mission of rescue.
This episode was one of their more emotional rescues to ever be seen on screen. It all ended well because the man was rescued, even though he was barely alive, but he recovered after hospital treatment. This episode, on airing, gave the crew more recognition and became one of their most famous episodes ever.
5 Drugs on Ice
Other than the normal daily towing jobs, Highway Thru Hell is never short of in-house drama and politics that makes the show even juicier. On one of the rescue adventures, Jamie Davis and his crew rescued a pharmaceutical trailer that crashed with expensive drugs in it. The cause of the crash was an intense snowstorm which happened a few weeks before the accident. The trailer became embedded in a huge chunk of roadside ice, and to make matters worse, the truck then tumbled down a riverbank resulting in the damage of its pricy cargo, which was all lost but no human lives were.
4 Snowmageddon
This episode with its title being Snowmageddon featured one of the most dangerous rescues of all time in the ninth episode of the third season. This episode was all snow-covered with the air being windy and hazy. A great snowfall brought the Coquihalla Highway to its knees resulting in major tension and serious accidents. Due to this event, Jamie and his rescue team carried out a number of intense rescue missions that resulted not only in sudden emotional responses but also high impact expeditions. As if all that wasn’t bad enough, the rescue team had to clean up a toxic chemical spill.
3 Rockslide
This episode became the sixteenth episode of the seventh season and it featured one of the season's scariest missions. The major rescues of this season being victims of mudslides, regular snowstorms, and a number of extreme weather-induced conditions, send a message of how dangerous this season was. Jamie and his crew went on a rescue when a rock slide occurred down the side of a mountain and resulted in the damage of a number of cars with several drivers trapped in their vehicles and some trapped in the cold. As usual, the rescue team saved the day again without any casualties.
2 Poles
To give a good view of how this job is, Jamie had to call his brother Jason to come along with his rotation to help resolve a problem. It was the ninth episode of the fifth season that showed crew on a massive recovery mission but it was the issues that came after the rescue that seriously affected one of the team. They ended up on the wrong end of a load of loose telephone poles which gave them a great deal of trouble, but it didn’t end there. It turned out that one of Jaime’s crew members crashed because of the lost load. The disaster resulted in the need for emergency services to come in.
1 Push and Pull
Even though some might believe that the things that take place on this show must have been staged, the truth is that you can’t really make this stuff up because it is full of unpredictability. In the tenth episode of the third season, the crew went on one of the most dangerous missions ever. As of this time, the show was Canada’s most successful TV series and it was increasing exponentially in terms of audience size. This episode featured a tour bus that went out of control, causing Jamie and his crew to rise into action as fast as possible. This episode also featured a truck filled with live pigs.