A Courtenay girl, 12, was rescued from an underground bank vault Tuesday night after a game of hide-and-seek went awry.

Emergency responders, city workers and locksmiths came to the aid of the young girl.

article continues below

A jackhammer had to be used to break through a 14-inch subterranean concrete wall to get her out.

The drama unfolded in the basement of the Mandarin Village Restaurant on Fifth Street, which until the mid-1970s was a branch of the Royal Bank of Canada.

The walk-in fortified vault, which measures about 15 feet by 12 feet and which is accessed down steep stairs, was used in more recent years as a storage room by the restaurant.

But the heavily armoured door of the century-old chamber still had two locking mechanisms, both of which turned out to be active despite being unused for nearly 40 years.

During a playful game of hide-and-seek, the girl went into the vault and the door got locked - and with no one knowing the combinations that could get her out, her older sister called 911.

Fire, police and ambulance services were alerted and they called in experts from the Courtenay branch of Price’s Locks on Cliffe Avenue to see if they could get the door open.

Price’s branch manager, Troy Atchison, said they got the call at about 5:45 p.m. They had no idea the building contained an old bank vault, but immediately set to work trying to unlock it.

“There were two locks,” Atchison said. “The bottom one we were able to open using a combination, but there was no combination for the top lock of the vault. We initially tried a series of generic combinations, but without success.”

Meanwhile, calls were made to try to find anyone who once worked at the bank who might have any recollection or record of what combinations might have been used, but to no avail.

City Hall operations staff were alerted to the crisis and called to the scene with tools including a jackhammer, compressor, a snake-like sewer inspection camera and monitoring equipment.

Traffic diversions were put in place as a section of Fifth Street between Cliffe and Duncan was closed off, as was a stretch of Cliffe outside the Sid Williams Theatre.

“The next step was to drill a small hole through the concrete and the sewer camera was passed through to see if the child was OK and allow air into the vault,” Atchison explained.

They got the girl to point the camera lens at the back of the door, and after viewing the images on the monitor, they thought they had found a way to resolve the problem.

“Using the camera we determined we could open the lock from the back,” said Atchison.

Such a move required one screw to be removed from the back plate of the lock so they could see the mechanism and give instructions to the trapped girl on the next steps.

“We passed a screwdriver through, but unfortunately she was not strong enough to unscrew the back plate of the lock and was getting frustrated.”

Courtenay’s deputy fire chief, Kurt Macdonald, said the locksmiths had worked hard and fast to try to get the tumbles on the combination to work.

But after the problems encountered with the screw, their options were running out to make sure the girl was rescued.

The decision was taken that they must break through the concrete side of the vault, creating a hole big enough to haul the girl to safety.

A face mask was passed through to the child, who was told to get as far away from the wall as she could. She needed to crouch down to try to protect herself from any debris that might fly, and cover her ears against the intense noise of jackhammering in a confined space.

Because the vibrating jackhammer had to be held at shoulder height to cut horizontally rather than vertically, firefighters and City workers took turns before finally getting through the wall.

Macdonald praised his colleagues and City workers who had managed to penetrate the concrete.

“We used a 90lb jackhammer and when we came out it looked as though we had all been in a flour storm,” he said.

It was a relief the task had not been to get in to a more recent bank vault, he added. He believed the walls of those were a sandwich of steel inside concrete to hinder access.

Keir Gervais, Courtenay’s manager of operations, praised the efforts of municipal workers from both the roads and sewer and drainage teams who had been called out to assist.

“Ed Harrison, who ironically is also a volunteer firefighter, was on after-hours standby (duty). He took the call and put together a team with the skills needed, and they did a fantastic job,” said Gervais. “When I read the reports of what had happened this morning (Wednesday), it was a real eyebrow-raiser.”

Atchison, Macdonald and Gervais all commented on the focused teamwork that had been displayed on site to resolve the crisis successfully, each praising the others for their efforts.

As for the girl - who is not being identified - she was physically uninjured but shaken. She had a reasonable night’s sleep and was at school again the next day.

Her family said they were both relieved and extremely grateful for all the efforts made by those involved in the rescue and the successful outcome.

The same thing will never happen again at that location, as Price’s Locks is going back to the property and decommissioning both locks for good without charge.

But it could be an issue elsewhere. The restaurant is not the only building in town that was once a bank, and local historian Lawrence Burns said he could think of several buildings or sites in and around Courtenay that had in times past served the same purpose.

He witnessed elements of the rescue operation on Tuesday evening, and said maybe there was a lesson in what had happened for any property owners occupying buildings with walk-in vaults. It was that old locks needed to be fully decommissioned so accidents couldn’t happen.