With the Tough Mudder event taking place this past weekend, the RCMP helped to keep residents safe, directing traffic, and even got a few phone calls about people being stuck in the mud.
RCMP Drumheller Corporal Kevin Charles said the event went well from the RCMP point-of-view.
“We had extra members working just dedicated to Tough Mudder to help out with the traffic control and from a public safety aspect,” he said.
He noted to The Mail that even though there was an increase in registrations this year, numbers were down because of the weather.
“The only real rural problem was the parking on Saturday. They used that big field as a parking lot for general parking, and with all the rain, obviously it just became a real mud hole,” he said.
“Tough Mudder was very, very well organized. They have contingency plans for everything, anything possible could go wrong and they have plans for it. In this case, they realized okay, vehicles are getting stuck so they had contracts ready to go for towing and vehicle removal, which included farm machinery and tow trucks, so it worked,” Charles explained.
“We helped out with traffic control on the Institutional road and it was slow going but we got everybody out,” he said, mentioning that many members of the public were getting “frustrated and upset” and were calling the police about being stuck in the field.
“At the end of the day that is not a police issue. We are there to help out with traffic control and we just urged everyone to be patient, we aren’t going to leave anyone abandoned in a field, the tows would get to them eventually, and they did,” he said.
“A lot of the participants were laughing, having fun. There were groups of them taking turns pushing each other out, they had fun with it, but there were some who wanted to go home to a hot shower and they were stuck,” he said, continuing by adding that he wouldn’t want a parking issue to overshadow the whole weekend.
“It was a great weekend, great experience. There were no issues, everyone was there to have fun and I think the parking was just a minimallittle road bump, which they overcame. Again that contributed to the extreme well planning and professionalism of the Tough Mudder crew,” he said.
