Highway Thru Hell

The winter season is already off to a hellish start when a major blizzard slams the Coquihalla Highway. Jamie Davis Heavy Rescue's "A" team, Adam and Kevin, spends a busy morning clearing spun out semis off the road when word comes that a multi vehicle pile-up has closed down both northbound lanes. While Adam scrambles to get the highway open, Jamie tries to free a semi from a steep, icy off-ramp. Jamie's eldest son, Brandon's first night on the job ended when he discovered a driver fatality crushed by the wheels.

A double-trailer load of lumber had flipped and spilled across a quarter mile of highway. Even with three heavy rescue trucks, Jamie's crew doesn't have enough equipment to do the job right. Adam is angry about the lack of equipment and the poor condition of his truck. Last year, Jamie ordered a state of the art heavy rescue truck called a Rotator. But the busy winter season is here and the custom-built wrecker still hasn't been delivered. Just days before Christmas, Jamie heads to the factory in Tennessee to bring it home himself with his new recruit, Hugo. While they are gone, Adam has his hands full with the B team when a semi filled with expensive wine goes off a cliff.

Jamie's having second thoughts about bringing his son Brandon onboard when the teenager spends his paycheck on ear piercings. Then his right hand man Kevin shows up to a wreck without the gear he needs to control traffic. When Jamie confronts him, Kevin storms off the job. Jamie's one bright spot is his brand new truck, the Rotator. But even that lets him down when he's called out to save a trailer stuck in a ditch, and only ends up destroying it after Kevin discovered it was weighed down by boxes of cadmium. Next night, little Jamie Jr. joins in as an observer for a seemingly 'easy job', only for Junior to fall asleep in the truck, while Jamie, Kevin and Brandon witnessed two more accidents in deteriorating weather and road conditions, turning it into a multi-car pileup, and Jamie ended up unnecessarily destroying the snow plow.

To keep up with a busy season, Jamie hires on a new guy, greenhorn driver Rob. When Rob turns out to be a slow learner - and then goes AWOL during a major blizzard - Jamie's patience is pushed to the breaking point. Out of boredom, a prank on Rob ended on a sour note when news of a reefer truck with frozen foods crashes over a bank that ended up killing the driver, Jamie is forced to bring in a pick-up crew just to do the recovery while Rob guards the trailer. However, with the cables for flipping the truck snapping, Jamie could get eletrocuted under the live electrical cables. Before firing Rob, he decides to give him one last chance when a call comes in for a repo job.

Jamie isn't the only tow guy on the Coq. Lone wolf Al Quiring is a tough as nails wrecker and Jamie's main rival, and despite living on the edge of Vancouver, is willing to travel long distances to poach work from Jamie's crew. Their dads did battle a generation ago, now Jamie and Al are fighting it out for the title -"King of the Coq". When the Rotator lands in the shop during an especially busy week by a cheap gasket leakage, Al uses it as a chance to scoop a job off Jamie. Things get more complicated when one of Jamie's new drivers, from the city, learns a close buddy has nearly died in a towing accident during a snowstorm. Ken Monkhouse, who is Vancouver-based, and far more experienced compared to Rob, is working only on commission, and having to hunt for work himself frustrates him, but has to put everything into perspective when he heads to the hospital and comes face to face with the reality of the career he has chosen, and a buddy who has lost his leg, while desperately trying to save the other leg, and was full conscious and aware through the ordeal when it was filmed on the news. To make matters worse, Adam and Hugo must team up with Al and his new driver, Gord, to free up traffic after a multi-truck accident blocked the Coq, as well as racing against each other to get the better cut of the earnings.

Heavy snowfall has created avalanche conditions on the Coq. Plow crews are barely able to keep up. When traffic starts backing up in high-risk avalanche zones, highway authorities decide to close the road in both directions. A team of avalanche techs flies up the mountain in helicopters to drop concussion bombs and release the build-up, but bad weather hampers their first attempt. With the Coq closed overnight, trucks are using the back roads to get through. Jamie's team is called out to recover a semi that went over the cliff on rural Highway 3. The next day is a battle on all fronts to get the Coq open - with helicopter teams dropping more bombs, highway crews faced with two feet of accumulation, and Jamie's team forced to call in a second rotator, who happened to be Jamie's brother, Jason.

In the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, on the Coquihalla Highway, a small job turns into a major headache and a father's dreams of his stepson joining the family business backfires as Brandon Kodallas' aspirations of being a gym instructor and his disdain to drive a manual transmission vehicles does not sit well with anybody else, while teaching Ken about rigging, something the Richmond-based city towie doesn't do. When Ken and Samy were on their fourth attempt to recover an empty SUV that plunged off the cliff and into a river 1000 feet below, a simple job turned into a lost cause for the company. Brandon walked off on the job after the operation took a lot longer than expected, but next morning, he learns the basics of car recovery and towing, but by the fifth attempt at recovering the car, Jamie gave up calling on Brandon and asked Gord to help. After the job was finally done, Brandon invited Jamie and his wife to his gym and showed him his interpretation of the meaning of 'dedication'.

Why is one guy always happy, while another is always pissed off? Kevin considers yard man/swamper Samy, a 40-year-old immigrant from Fiji, to be his assistant. When Kevin buys a video camera to film wrecks, his new hobby starts to get in the way of his current job. A head-on collision between two semis has the entire crew battling to clear the charred wreckage and get the road open. While Kevin captures the action on tape, Samy does most of the heavy lifting and dismantling of the burnt wreck, earning him a large bottle of scotch and Jamie's praise, even when he removed the barrel that could have been used to contain an oil leak, which heaped pressure to do a 2-hour salvage operation in just 20-minutes just to open the highway. That night, Samy, who sleeps in Jamie's office during the week, reveals that his hard work is all for his beloved wife and three kids. Meanwhile, Kevin, reviewing his footage at home, reveals that his video hobby started with his father, who worked in TV. When Kevin announced as a teen that he wanted to be a truck driver, his dad cut him off and hasn't seen him in over 20 years. He considers Jamie to be his adopted father. The next day, a harrowing drive up the Coq in dangerous avalanche conditions leaves both Kevin and Samy questioning why they do this for a living. Samy returns to Vancouver to visit his family while Kevin raises safety issues with Jamie. Since Kevin's truck was a converted fire truck, it has no protection from collisions.

With spring coming, Jamie is facing a backlog of bills and heavy pressure to cut costs by laying off some of his staff, with Kevin and Samy laid off. When a semi full of mail goes off a cliff, Adam and the weary crew are sent out to unload and recover it. But a long season has everyone's tempers on edge. When a winter-worn cable snaps, narrowly missing Adams head, Jamie's most senior driver threatens to go on strike. In the end of the winter season, Jamie has to be on call to deal with the wrecks alone.

Join series producer and host of the one-hour special, Mark Miller, as he takes viewers to the legendary "Barn" in Hope, BC, to join Jamie Davis and his crew for a season wrap-up "Beer O'clock". Here, no topic is off limits as Jamie, Adam, Kevin, Bruce, and Samy trade stories from this season of working on the mountain.