On a late July afternoon in 1997, an immense crowd encircled a police van. They united for two words: ROLL IT. The Parksville Sandcastle Riot had begun.

This is what Kristos Seiler—a man who saw it firsthand—tells me as we stand in his kitchen decades later.

“I didn’t hear the interaction with the police, but all of a sudden, people started chanting: ROLL IT, ROLL IT, ROLL IT!” A faint smile creeps through his beard. “And I remember a whole bunch of people on either side of the van, rocking the van back and forth.”

How much can a town forget?

The broken glass is easy enough to sweep aside. Community events can be restarted and rescheduled. But as time goes by, incidents like this seem to get smoothed over and buried in a place like Parksville, BC. The riot sinks a little deeper below the sand with each passing year.

Next summer will be the three-decade anniversary of the Sandcastle Riot of July 19, 1997. A minimal but useful summary appears as a sample case in Abbotsford’s municipal hazard preparedness guide: “Following the Sand Castle Festival weekend, store windows were smashed by a crowd of 600 to 1,000 young people. Police arrested more than 100 individuals.”

This description fails to mention the lead-up. Or the tear gas. Or the dogs.

In the careful streets of central Parksville, where people install pinging devices in their gardens to drive the deer away, it might be easier to scrub the riot out of history.

Nobody seems to know what to do with it, and maybe that is why it’s so hard to track in the historical record.

But how could so many people be driven to such a breaking point—driven to roll it—by something history has forgotten?

The facts are few and far between, and the two sources that might seem the most authoritative (CTV News and the provincial government’s website) each offer a dead link. 

The event only seems to survive in local lore, obscure papers, and in the memories of those who were there. 

When I visit the Parksville Museum to ask about it, I’m told that the relevant documents are deep in the archives, and that getting them would push me days behind my deadline for the piece.

Uncertainty reigns. Some people I speak to are unwilling to be quoted because they don’t trust the veracity of their own statements about the incident.

But Seiler was there, at least for a while. He tells me his story on a warm October night, and from his window I can almost see all the way downhill to the heart of town, where the riot took place. 

There were certain problems from the beginning. The organizers of the event, Seiler says, had planned a beer garden for the crowd. But the unexpected size of the crowd—reaching into the thousands—was enough to deter the idea. To avoid chaos, he says, the beer garden was cancelled.

“Some people got choked about that, and a crowd just formed … The park was, to my recollection,” he says, “full of people. The most people I’d ever seen before or since.”

He cannot recall the exact instant where it all started. He places his broad hands on the counter and stares off through the dark window. “I remember the police paddywagon rolling in through the yellow gate,” Seiler says. “There were so few cops and so many people.”

Traditionally, it was standard practice to have 45 or fewer police officers present. Faced with thousands of attendees, they could not have asserted control of the growing unrest.

This scene was the first tremble of chaos. As Seiler describes it, the breaking point came soon afterwards: “this group of about 15 to 20 people started heading away from the crowd, up the hill.” 

“They walked southbound on the highway; you couldn’t see them anymore. And it wasn’t too long after that that stuff went sideways. I didn’t see this part, but that group [went] up and smashed the windows [of] the liquor store, which was closed. They started looting the liquor store.”

His eyebrows raise in bemusement but his voice is firm. Every few sentences he glances up, in the direction of the beach and downtown area where it all went down.

“[That was] something I’d never seen before: a crowd getting totally whipped up, out of hand, not even knowing why. I think it was just a mob mentality at that point. People just lost their minds.”

At this point, Seiler decided other concerns were more pressing than watching the chaos. Returning in the direction of his truck, he found a much harsher scene:

“Somewhere on the [inland] side of the highway, we walked around this corner into this parking lot … There were a couple of police officers, and a dog, and a woman on the ground. The dog was standing over her; it might’ve even been biting her … one of the cops looked up [at us], and he just said something like, ‘get the f—k out of here or you’re next!’”

“We were shocked; they were beating on this lady … we didn’t know what to do at that point. When you see something like that, you’re like, should I jump in?”

He shakes his head a bit, then draws his story to a close.

“After the police had threatened us, threatened to turn the dog on us, my buddy and I talked and decided we should maybe take off … We were making our way back to Ladysmith, and I just remember, somewhere around the Arlington [Inn] in Nanoose, police car after police car after police car going in the other direction.”

Seiler watched them pass: a long procession of red and blue lights hurtling northwest, into the night.

Seiler was gone after that. He didn’t stick around to see the full extent of the events, which stretched long past midnight. The police remained on scene until five in the morning.

Rioters “broke into and looted some 20 local businesses,” said the Spokesman-Review¹—they described mass arrests, first reported as “more than one hundred,” then amended a month later to 97, although other sources seem to have stuck with the original amount.

As chaos raged outside, many other attendees were still indoors. “Saturday night’s Sandcastle dance,” had been scheduled for the evening. A program of events in the local paper lists two separate dances, both beginning at 8 pm: a Youth Dance ($5 admission) and a “Sandblast Dance featuring ‘Monkey Business’” ($20 admission). 

“The dance was held in the Parksville Arena,” says Judith Elliott, an attendee, “[which is] now the curling rink.”

Interestingly, she describes a bit of local premonition: “All day long … there were rumours that there might be some kind of disturbance that evening,” citing local concerns about the influx of “out-of-town people.”

Inside the arena, news was slow to materialize. But by evening, Elliott says, “[We] heard rumblings about what was happening up in the town.”

“When the time came that the dance would normally end,” she says, “it was decided to keep the crowd in the arena. I can’t remember what time the people were let out, but my husband had to work the next day, so we ventured up the hill through town to home, I think, around 12:30 or so. There was a lot of action downtown, and there had been some damage to some of the shops.”

“When we got home, we listened on our police scanner to what was happening downtown. It went on for a long time.”

It raged deep into the night. Officers were called in from as far as Nanaimo and Port Alberni. These officers deployed tear gas against the crowd. Dozens of smashed windows covered the streets with glass shards. Flashing police lights lit up the park and the downtown area.

Local resident Lynne L’Heureux watched the riot spill right into her backyard on Weld St. “People started hiding [there]” as police tried to disperse the crowd, she says. Her “fence was missing a panel … [the people] could peek out and see where the police were. We stayed inside so we wouldn’t be accused of being involved.”

“I can’t actually remember,” she observes, “if there was smoke and mace in the air or if that’s just something my brain has decided was real.”

But by Sunday, Parksville’s event president, Al Kaario, was already declaring, “You wouldn’t know anything happened.” A rapid cleanup was carried out. The next day’s activities could “go ahead unencumbered.”

The most lasting impact was next year’s cancellation of the event. Mayor Julia Macdonald announced in mid-August that there would be no 1998 Sand Castle Festival.

Today, when I visit the park where it began, empty pits of sand greet me: the sandcastles aren’t built and displayed on the beach itself, but on an artificial field of sand a few metres inland. 

At this time of year, there’s little sign of last summer’s 2026 Sand Sculpting Competition. Every castle has been whittled away by the wind and swept into the grey sea.

A mystery seems to haunt the park now. 

The rationale quickly faded away from any conversation about the riot. By August 21, 1997, a month after it happened, the Spokesman-Review had already stopped concerning itself with causation when mentioning the event.

I mill around in the empty baseball field. It sits beside a long hill that leads up to the highway and the downtown area. Seiler told me that he was standing somewhere around here when the police van rolled through the gate, shortly before the shouts of ROLL IT.

Today it’s deserted.

The town does not talk about the incident. I grew up out here without ever hearing a word about it until my friend’s father recently mentioned it in passing. Until last month, I came to this park, composed of huge empty zones, and never knew a single thing about the night-long spasm that gripped it 29 years ago. 

Maybe it’s easier to forget these things in a small town. There are fewer people here to remember it.

Down by the water, those expanses of sand sit and wait. There are no sandcastles today. Nothing at all marks them, except a lone seagull.

¹ Despite being a distant paper (based in Spokane, Washington), the Spokesman-Review actually offers the most in-depth coverage of any currently accessible publication. It appears to be the only one with multiple digitally archived reports on the riot.

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