When Grady Stephenson first received the call about a collision on the Trans-Canada Highway near Carberry, he said it was nothing out of the ordinary.

“It’s been 50 years of issues at that intersection. So that was nothing new,” the former deputy chief of Carberry and Cypress-Langford Fire Department said on Friday during his presentation at the Brandon Emergency Services Conference at the Keystone Centre.

As he got closer, he saw a plume of smoke coming from the burning bus, with vehicles and people everywhere, and recognized the gravity of what he was dealing with.

“I’m sitting there looking out the window of the truck, and I just stared at it,” he said.

“That was my holy-shit moment … The only way I can describe it is it was a scene out of a movie.”

Now, two years later, Stephenson

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