Red & Black Hockey
Hurricanes prospects injured in bus crash
by David Lee on 02/19/09 at 03:06 PM ET
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Late Wednesday night following a 3-2 loss to the Lowell Lock Monsters, the Albany River Rats’ team bus flipped over on the Massachusetts Turnpike. Four players and the radio color commentator suffered significant injury. The injuries have been described as “serious, but not life- or career-threatening”. Albany’s games on Friday against Bridgeport and on Sunday against the Baby Penguins have been canceled with no make-up dates announced.
Obviously, my thoughts and best wishes are with the Rats as they deal with this physical and emotional trauma.
Defensemen Casey Borer, 23; forward Nicolas Blanchard, 21; forward Joe Jensen, 26; and defenseman Jonathan Paiement, 23, are being kept at a Massachusetts hospital for observation. The exact extent of their injuries isn’t being reported.
Phil Janack, who writes a River Rats blog for the Schenectady Daily Gazette is doing a phenomenal job of updating the situation as details become available.
The bus they were using was actually an emergency back-up: their normal bus had already broken down, delaying their travel by a couple of hours.
Massachusetts state police said that the bus was traveling westbound on I-90 in snowy conditions when the crash happened at 3:25 this morning in the town of Becket, Mass., about 56 miles from Albany. The Yankee Trails coach struck a guardrail and rolled over onto its left side and into both lanes of traffic.
Police said there were 29 people on board the bus; five were taken to Berkshire Medical Center in an ambulance, three with what appeared to be serious injuries. Another two complained of neck pain. The remaining 24 people were driven to BMC in a separate bus.
Team captain Tim “We got us a great big” Conboy was not on the bus, as he has been recalled by Carolina for tonight’s game on Lawn Guylund. The rest of the team has arrived safely in Albany. Their equipment was left behind. Some of it has been retrieved, but some of it is damaged and soaked.
we don’t know all the details on the condition of the equipment. (Albany equipment manager) Jason McGrath tells me it appears that we pretty much lost all of our gear. In saying ‘lost,’ we don’t mean misplaced but that it was part of the wreckage and can’t be salvaged. We’ll have to scramble and see where we can get appropriate pads and skates and helmets and that kind of stuff and make that part of the final decision.
According to all reports, even as the players and all the gear were strewn all over the interstate highway, tractor-trailers whizzed by, barely missing the wreckage. The players avoided further damage, but the gear did not.
Our gear was scattered all over the road. From what I heard, Justin Peters goal mask was squashed flat like a pancake, so we wouldn’t even have equipment to play let alone players in their mental state right now.
“From a mental and physcial standpoint, I’d only have 20 guys to dress tomorrow night, to the basics of we don’t have equipment. Our equipment was scattered all over the highway. Some stuff was shattered. We have no idea what state our gear is in, and that’s way down on the chart.”
Rats president and CEO Garen Szablewski is reporting that he’s already had offers from several AHL teams for the loan of practice equipment. At this juncture, they have nothing, but will probably get some equipment and funds from the Hurricanes.
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About Red & Black Hockey
David Lee is a restaurant manager with an unused degree in political science. He can be found at Carolina Hurricanes games, Scrabble tournaments and indie-rock shows. Sometimes, all in the same day.
David has contributed to CBC.ca for their Stanley Cup playoff coverage in 2006 and to the New York Times Slapshot blog for theirs in 2008. Red and Black Hockey was founded in July of 2005.
