Local poet describes harrowing experience trapped in old septic tank

DAWSON CREEK, B.C. — A woman from Rolla partially blames drought conditions in the Peace region for a recent accident that saw her fall into a pit of ice-cold water for more than 20 minutes.

One day in late April, Donna Kane was standing on the front lawn of her home – where she’s spent the last 18 years – staining her deck, when she felt “the earth just, without warning, gave way” beneath her feet.

Kane fell into an old septic tank that she didn’t know existed on the property. Thankfully, it hadn’t been used in roughly 30 years, so the water wasn’t contaminated, but it was ice cold, since snow in the area had only recently thawed.

“I didn’t know what it was, at the time,” Kane said in an interview on the May 30th episode of This Week in the Peace discussing her ordeal. “I just knew I had fallen through the earth.”

The amount of water in the tank was enough to submerge Kane, meaning she had to use “every muscle in [her] body” to keep herself from drowning. She said she didn’t experience any significant physical injuries, but described the event as traumatizing.

“When I first fell in, I thought immediately Wayne, my husband, would come out, because he was literally 10 feet away,” Kane said. “He was sitting in the living room, but it was windy, I was in a hole so my voice was muffled, and he had the radio on, so he couldn’t hear me.”

Kane was able to keep herself afloat with help from a nearby deck chair.

“I’m pretty good at treading water, but I’m not sure how long I could have lasted if I couldn’t get part of my body out of the water,” she said.

Her husband ultimately found her after roughly 20 minutes.

“It was effortless,” Kane said. “He pulled me out like I was a piece of paper.”

Once she was extracted, Kane learned all that had separated her from the septic tank for all the years she had lived there was roughly two feet of dirt and one rotten plywood lid.

“Clay normally, when we’re not in drought conditions, is very absorbent – like, it can hold the moisture – and it’s very stable. But with our drought conditions, the clay around here just turned to crumbs, so I think the earth collapsed due to the drought.”

Kane says she believes many older properties in the Peace region have similar undocumented objects underground, because of the nature of when they were built.

She urges residents to be mindful of the possibility and to look into any depressions in the ground on their land – after the fall, Kane realized she and her husband had noticed a small depression in that spot in the past, but thought nothing of it.

In the aftermath, Kane said she and her husband pumped the contents of the disused tank and used it to water their plants, then filled it in with dirt and rocks.

Kane – a poet and writer – said the experience has prompted her to think about the impacts of climate change for a book she’s working on.

“I’m a little more aware [of depressions in our yard],” Kane added. “And, if I go down into a dip, I still kind of startle myself. It’s probably going to take a while before I don’t have this feeling of falling, and it was quite claustrophobic.

“To be so close to your house, where you feel the safest, and to find yourself in a situation where, if Wayne hadn’t come out probably in the next 15-20 minutes, I probably wouldn’t have made it because it was so cold that I was frozen really from the chest down and I couldn’t hang on forever.”

To view the full interview with Kane, look below.