Scott Simon was among 27 everyday Calgarians, first responders and even young children honoured at the Calgary Fire Department’s Recognition Awards luncheon Thursday.
Unfortunately, not every heroic story has a happy ending.
Simon was the captain of a fire crew attending to a call July 31, 2015, when a van crashed into a northeast retention pond.
“Originally the call was … there was supposed to be four kids in the car,” Simon said. “On any call, when you hear that there’s kids involved … everything escalates.”
He described a emotionally charged scene. Witnesses said the van failed to make a turn on Saddlehorn Drive and launched some 40 metres into the murky water.
“It basically became ‘hey, we’ve got to think way outside the box. What are we gonna do?’ And I said, ‘I think I can swim out there.'”
Simon had earlier training as part of the department’s Aquatic Rescue Team but he and the colleague who went in with him had no gear.
“It was cold, it was mucky, it was dark water … you couldn’t see anything,” Simon said. “We couldn’t find the driver … so you just kept diving down and trying to go deeper.”
Another witness, who also jumped in the water, later told crews he had seen the driver trying to swim to shore.
“Slowly the one head went under and, by the time I got to him, I just couldn’t save him,” Duffy Pruyn told Global News.
Gurinder Dhaliwal, 22, was known by his friends as Gary. He was a disc-jockey and aspiring model. The aquatic rescue team later found him halfway between the van and shore.
READ MORE: Friends identify man killed in SUV pond crash
“You always think that you could have done something different or if I had maybe asked more people, maybe I could have had a better idea of what was going on,” Simon said.
“Successful or not, it’s the fact you put yourself at risk to try and save somebody,” Fire Chief Steve Dongworth said.
“It’s not always going to be successful but it makes it no less heroic, from my perspective.”
Also among the Calgarians honoured Thursday were young Dylan and Ethan Heatley.
They were credited for saving their grandfather’s life when he suffered a heart attack in the backcountry.
Thomas Snow and Mike Rapley were honoured for successfully stopping a CTrain from hitting a man who had fallen onto the LRT tracks, hitting his head last March.
Beniot St. Pierre, also a fire fighter, received the highest honour – a Medal of Bravery – for saving two people buried in a Kananaskis avalanche in March of 2014.
“You’re actually left speechless by some of the stories,” Dongworth said.
“It leaves me very proud as a Calgarian.”
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