CARDSTON— Five people, including two children, were killed when the pickup truck they were in collided with a backhoe in southwestern Alberta.
RCMP Sgt. Patrick Webb said seven people in the pickup truck were driving on Highway 810 just north of Glenwood, when the collision occurred.
Two other adults in the vehicle were taken to hospital with non life-threatening injuries, while the driver of the backhoe was not injured.
Several media outlets are reporting the dead are from the same family, but Webb won’t confirm that. He did say there are associations between the people in the car, and said the children were a “young” boy and a girl, but they are not babies or toddlers.
Webb couldn’t say where the dead were from.
Police are also trying to determine whether alcohol may have contributed to the collision.
“We’re considering whether it was a factor,” Webb said.
RCMP say when officers got to the scene the vehicle was so badly damaged they could not get into it.
“It rolled on its roof and at the same time trapped a number of the victims in it. It was very disturbing for the emergency services people, police, EMS and fire department to work a scene like that, it’s bad enough tow work a single fatality,” Webb said.