A Williams Lake man said he’s very fortunate to have survived a motorcycle accident on Canada Day.
On Tuesday around 8 a.m. Lucas Jurek headed out on Highway 97 North driving his BMWF700GS for a planned three-week trip to Alaska. About 15 minutes north of town he suddenly hit a doe.
“Glory goes to God,” Jurek said Wednesday. “He must have a plan for me because I’m still here without any injuries.”
Jurek doesn’t remember what happened after hitting the deer, however, Const. Dan Cohen of the Williams Lake RCMP said a witness saw Jurek and his bike slide separately 150 feet down the highway after the impact.
“The next thing I remember was standing beside the motorcycle in the middle of the highway on the right side of the yellow line,” Jurek recalled, explaining how emergency crews were on scene asking him if he was hurting anywhere. He told them not that he could feel so far.
Traffic was blocked both ways and two of Jurek’s aluminum pannier boxes were about 100 feet away on the left shoulder of the road. A third pannier was still on the bike but the whole top of it was extensively “sanded.”
The instrument panel and windshield were broken and the handlebars were cracked which led Jurek to wonder if at one point the bike was actually sliding upside down.
“From the damage I can see I fell over to the left,” he explained, as he lifted his biking jacket showing how the left side was fairly shredded.
His helmet was mostly scraped in the chin area and Jurek said his adam’s apple was pretty sore Tuesday, making it painful to swallow.
He has bruising and swelling on his right knee, a skinned right pinky finger, a couple of sore ribs and his chin’s a little swollen, but that’s about it, he said.
At the accident scene, emergency personnel put him on stretcher with a collar on his neck and transported him by ambulance to the hospital, where the emergency doctor examined him fully.
“They did a full X-ray from one end to other and told me congratulations I wasn’t hurt and I could go.”
Originally Jurek planned to be gone for three weeks on his trip — first to visit friends in Palmer, Alaska and then travel to Anchorage, Homer, Denali National Park, Fairbanks and possibly up to the Arctic Circle.
Instead he only made it 15 minutes out of town.
It is interesting how he and Const. Cohen noticed each other before the accident, he said.
Const. Cohen was driving a cruiser north, en route to another deer and vehicle collision, when he passed Jurek.
He looked over at Jurek’s bike and thought “that guy has a nice setup,” he recalled.
As the cruiser passed him, Jurek reminded himself that he had all the time in the world, and decided he was going to keep the speed limit between 80 and 100 kilometres an hour, enjoy himself and have a great time.
Ten minutes later Cohen was called to Jurek’s accident and turned around.
“There were three separate incidents with vehicles hitting deer that morning,” Cohen said Wednesday night. “It must be that time of year. Lucas was really lucky.”
Jurek, however, insisted it’s not about luck.
Born and raised in a Seventh Day Adventist Christian home, he credited angels for carrying him along the highway Tuesday morning.
“I didn’t get hit, the motorcycle didn’t hit me, I didn’t break my neck falling off the bike, nobody was coming the other way or when they were, they stopped ahead of time,” he said.