Planning a winter road trip in B.C.? Watch Highway Thru Hell first
Credit to Author: Shawn Conner| Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2019 23:33:13 +0000
Highway Thru Hell
When: Monday nights at 7 p.m.
Where: Discovery Channel (check local listings)
Anyone who’s driven the Coquihalla Highway in the winter will be able to relate to Highway Thru Hell. Now in its eighth season, the Discovery Channel reality show follows tow-truck drivers as they respond to highway accidents and roadside emergencies in the worst conditions.
We talked to Jamie Davis, who operates a heavy-recovery tow company in Hope and is one of the featured drivers, about the show’s success (it’s Discovery’s most-watched series and viewed in 200 territories, in more than 12 languages), vintage trucks and the International Towing & Recovery Hall of Fame.
Q: With the success of the show, you and your drivers must be local celebrities.
A: I don’t know about that. We’re just doing what we do every day. People are familiar with the show, but I would say that the celebrity thing is more out-of-town than in town. We do a lot of long-distance towing, so we could be in Southern California or Nebraska or South Dakota and people will drive by and recognize the trucks and wave, or stop us at a truck stop, that kind of thing. We have lots of people visit us in Hope, especially in the summer. We’ve had people from all over the world come to the yard to check things out.
Q: The show began airing in 2012. Did you see it becoming as popular as it did?
A: Nobody thought it would last more than a year. We thought, ‘Oh well, we’ll have some fun with it. It’s kind of a novelty. And we’ll just keep working and doing what we do.’ But it’s gotten way bigger than that.
Q: When you first started discussing the show, you said you wanted to change perceptions of the towing industry, is that right?
A: The towing business is a pretty rough business. The hours are long, there’s sleep deprivation, there’s competition. It’s not very lucrative, in B.C. especially. We live in this bubble where we’re trying to survive with fixed pricing and costs that keep increasing and work that’s intermittent. It’s dirty work, a hard job. I wanted people to see what we go through just to try to be here and do the job.
Q: You are a big fan of vintage equipment, and you’ve been turning to old trucks more and more. What do you see in them?
A: I’m a bit of a collector of equipment. I collect way too much. It’s a habit I need to stop. I’ve made a conscious decision to not do any more of that because I have so many in different stages of restoration or repair. The bucket list now is just to finish the projects I have. The problem we have is that business is very competitive and we just can’t afford the new stuff. We’re using and rebuilding the older trucks more out of financial reality.
Q: You’re about to be inducted into the International Towing & Recovery Hall of Fame this month. What can you tell us about that?
A: It’s in Tennessee. For our industry, it’s like the sports hall of fame. It’s a big honour to be inducted. There are only a few Canadians, maybe 29 out of the 300-and-something, that have been inducted. I know a lot of people in the industry, worldwide, and I’ve known them for a long, long time. A lot of the industry people are happy we’ve been able to show the towing industry on TV for the hard work it is and what it takes, and probably for the fact that we’ve been very honest in how we portray what we do.
Click here to see a preview of Season 8