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'Quiet, quiet community' struggles with aftermath of Tumbler Ridge mass shooting
Over the roughly 10 years he’s lived in Tumbler Ridge, Curtis Miedzinski almost never heard noises that disrupted the sleepy mountain town’s tranquil quiet. That changed late Tuesday afternoon, when the distinct thump of helicopter blades cut through the silence.
With a population just under 2,400, Tumbler Ridge is tucked away in the dense forests of the British Columbia interior, and is surrounded by three mountain ridges that give the municipality a distinct feeling of remoteness, residents say. That seclusion seemingly complicated emergency services’ efforts to respond to a mass shooting on Tuesday that left nine people dead and another 27 injured, according to the RCMP’s latest update.
On Wednesday afternoon, police identified 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar as the shooter.
A lack of local police and healthcare services meant that some emergency responders descended on the scene in choppers. Tumbler Ridge’s airstrip is located well outside of town limits, so the sounds of overhead traffic are rare.
“You never hear that,” said Miedzinski, the owner of Versatile Vinyl, a logo-making company in Tumbler Ridge. “We don’t have trains, we don’t have a major highway. It’s a quiet, quiet community.”
Miedzinski describes Tumbler Ridge as a perfect gateway for hiking, biking and hunting enthusiasts, surrounded by pristine lands and located far from the nearest urban centres. Established in the ’80s and built around a nearby coal mine, the town is a roughly two-hour drive from Grande Prairie, just across the border in Alberta, and just over an hour from Dawson Creek, an oil and gas town with a population just over 10,000.
Caris Windhausen, an events coordinator at the local museum, said river valleys and three distinct mountain ridges surrounding the town have long given Tumbler Ridge an isolated feeling.
“You don’t see much of humanity until you’re well outside of town,” she said.
The killer targeted a local school and another nearby home. The RCMP’s Major Crimes Unit is leading the investigation.
Tumbler Ridge’s town council had sought to address what it viewed as a lack of emergency services as recently as Feb. 9, according to transcripts of recent meetings reviewed by National Post. In particular, town councillors were looking to establish an emergency task force to help address “public healthcare gaps” and “structural concerns within the healthcare centre” in Tumbler Ridge, according to a summary of a recent meeting.
Currently, emergency care in Tumbler Ridge is not available in the evenings and on weekends, and council has been in discussions with Northern Health, the province’s regional health authority, about how to improve services. Tumbler RidgeLines, a local news organization, recently said after-hours emergency services in the town “can be described as: ‘call an ambulance.’”
Miedzinski said the shooting, one of the deadliest in Canada’s history, has hit the community hard. Residents tend to be highly community focused, know each other well, and take part in a raft of community-led services. Every Christmas, a resident dressed as Santa Claus delivers gifts to Tumbler Ridge’s children via snowmobile.
Miedzinski worries that some of the local first responders who were on the scene, and who were in some cases familiar with the victims, could leave the community following Tuesday’s violence.
“Whether it’s a first responder or a police officer, we’re going to lose those people,” he said.
The shooting also upended long understood expectations about a quiet town that was previously far removed from the sort of mass violence that attracts national attention.
“You would see this stuff happen in the bigger cities, but you never expect it to happen here.”
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