Highway catastrophes caused by good drivers?
By Cedric Hughes
Another week has passed in which horrific car crashes—one in Ontario and one in British Columbia—have captured national media attention. Rightly so. The loss of life has been horrendous. Both appear to be what Road Rules has taken to calling ‘textbook cases’ that should never have happened.
The Ontario crash claimed the lives of 11 people on Monday, February 6th,when a 15-passenger van carrying 13 migrant farm workers driven by a 45-year-old farm worker who regularly served as the driver of the passenger van, and a flatbed truck driven by a 38-year-old, professional owner-operator collided in a rural intersection near the hamlet of Hampstead, Ontario at 4:45 pm.
The intersection has been described as “home to a cow pasture, a small home and a large industrial garage.” Reportedly, the passenger van rolled past the stop sign into the truck’s path. The collision launched the van into the side of the small home where it came to rest on its side The truck driver and 10 of the 13 people in the van including, Mr. Hernandez, were killed. The three other van passengers were hospitalized with critical injuries.
Ontario police have called it one of the worst traffic collisions in that province’s history, a case of “driver error” and a crash that “did not have to happen” involving lives that “did not need to be lost.” A vexing detail: one of the first witnesses reported that while attempting to find, extract, and comfort the survivors he worked alone while other later-arriving witnesses took videos of the scene.
The BC crash claimed the lives of five people on Thursday, February 9th, around 8:30 am when an SUV carrying five passengers reportedly crossed the centre line of Highway 97, 60 kilometers north of Williams Lake into the path of an oncoming semitrailer truck. Both vehicles came to rest in the roadside ditch and burst into flames. The SUV driver, a 40 year old systems manager, his wife and their two children, and his sister died. The SUV driver was a big tennis fan, and was driving the family to Vancouver to attend an international tennis match.
The truck driver was not injured. Emergency response was somewhat delayed because the nearest small town has no RCMP detachment or volunteer fire department. The RCMP were
quoted as saying the cause of the crash may never be determined: “That’s fairly common where there’s a significant fire and the vehicles are basically totally destroyed. …If there is a mechanical issue with the vehicle, we’ll never know that.” Road conditions were described as bare but wet. A witness driving behind the SUV has been quoted as saying the SUV driver was not driving erratically or irresponsibly.
Recitation of the basic details of these crashes is an attempt to reconcile what happened with the idea that they need not have. ‘Careful drivers’ know that stop signs, centre lines, and big trucks need to be respected. By all accounts, all of the above-described drivers would normally have been so described. But it only takes a momentary lapse in a good driver’s attention to create a highway catastrophe.
Related posts:
- Dangerous Summer on the Highway
- Truck drivers need retesting once a year
- Winnipeg trucker killed in Coquihalla Highway crash
- Three die in tragic car crash on Highway 95 in B.C.
- Six local Good Samaritans walk hell highway in Iraq to help orphans By Veeno Dewan
Short URL: http://www.voiceonline.com/?p=7569
Posted by admin
on Feb 19 2012. Filed under Road Rules.
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