VERNON – Less than 24 hours after he had to be rescued by firefighters, an Oliver man is out of hospital and telling his story. Steve Hopp says he blacked out in the air and doesn’t remember his parachute becoming tangled in power lines on Monday.
Hopp has 25 solo skydives under his belt but Monday’s jump was his first in some time. Hopp describes the beginning of the skydive as uneventful.
“The parachute opened perfectly,” he says.
But then he started to feel nauseous. Still, he had a plan all laid out for his landing.
“I think I was thinking clearly and doing what I was supposed to do,” he says. “Then because of the nausea getting quite extreme, I was afraid I was actually going to throw up.”
His last memory before the accident, he was still above 1,100 feet in the air.
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His next memories are of being in the ambulance and then the hospital. Hopp says doctors found no signs of burns or evidence that he’d hit his head. He walked away from the accident with just deep bruising and swelling in his legs.
Okanagan Skydive, which facilitated Hopp’s jump, says they took several hours yesterday to give him extra training since it had been a while since the licensed skydiver’s last jump.
“There is nothing that I would change at all,” says owner Bret Chalmers. “The rules were reinforced with him during his evaluation before he jumped… They weren’t followed.”
Chalmers also points out Hopp is a licensed skydiver.
“That allows that skydiver to jump as a solo. He takes responsibility for himself,” he says.
Monday’s incident is not the first time a skydiver in Vernon has failed to hit their target. This week’s accident was the third in just over a year.
In July 2014 a student skydiver lost consciousness and hit a home during his landing. This June a man hit a chain link fence during the Great Canadian Free Fall Festival. However, Okanagan Skydive says they do thousands of jumps a year and there are few injuries. Chalmers says people should feel safe skydiving.
“In this past weekend you probably had more severe injuries on the rugby field and probably haven’t done a story over it. However, being that we’ve got parachutes it seems to attract a little more attention.”
Chalmers says two of the skydivers involved in recent accidents have been licensed and therefore are taking responsibility for themselves while the student skydiver fainted as a result of a medical condition. The skydiving outfit says it can’t control people’s actions in the air or if they suffer a medical emergency.
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