February was not a good month to be a fire truck, an emergency response vehicle, or an overpass.
Bear with me while I describe these for some truck drivers who keep slamming into them. Repeatedly!
Fire trucks are bright red and festooned with flashing lights, and emergency response vehicles are brightly painted with well-lit message boards. Overpasses are the structures you drive under and have their heights listed on the side of the road before you approach them. They will likely hurt you if you drive into them.
A firefighter from central Ontario was lucky to escape without injury after a driver drove their truck into his fire truck while he was protecting emergency workers on Highway 401.
The fire truck’s lights were activated, and the highway had been shut down. Emergency services were at the scene of an earlier multi-vehicle collision in the early hours of the morning.
The trucker drove on the shoulder of the highway before slamming into fire truck. Yes, drove on the shoulder of a closed highway and crashed into a parked vehicle with flashing lights.
“I beg you, please slow down,” was the plea from Dave Dawson, fire chief of Alnwick/Haldimand Township to transport truck drivers.
And this is not the first time a fire apparatus has been struck on Highway 401 in Northumberland County in February.
Earlier, a transport truck struck a Cobourg Fire Department pumper on Highway 401 sending one firefighter to hospital with minor injuries.
Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation (MTO) emergency response workers put themselves in harm’s way to help road users in trouble. It does not help when drivers don’t pay attention and crash into the trucks they drive.
Two MTO blocker trucks were in live lanes of traffic on Highway 401 protecting a collision scene ahead at about 2 a.m. one Sunday morning.
A four-wheeler crashed into them. One truck was unoccupied, the driver of the other escaped injury. The three occupants in the four-wheeler were hospitalized.
Police had to remind people to “pay attention when you see flashing lights.”
Truck drivers did not spare overpasses either. Three drivers drove their big rigs into them in British Columbia. A driver hauling a raised trailer joined the mayhem hitting an overpass in Ontario.
The problem is so serious in B.C. that government has a website that lists overpass crashes and provides information on the trucking company involved, cause of incident and enforcement carried out.
Last year there were 29 such incidents in the province. That’s a lot of truck drivers either distracted, not paying attention or not adhering to routes for oversized loads. They may have not been using a truck GPS. Or maybe they just didn’t give a damn.
Truckers are supposed to be professional drivers, and most are. Why do fire and police officials have to plead for people to pay attention and slow down when commonsense should suffice?
And what do we do with the few truck drivers who are reckless, indifferent or just plain stupid? These are not professionals; they are a menace.
Yes, I called them stupid. And so did Mike Farnworth, B.C. minister of transportation.
“You really have to question what kind of stupidity is it in terms of not making sure that you are following the prescribed route,” he told Global News.
A carrier’s name is present on the truck and sometimes the trailer too. It’s a public relations nightmare once pictures of equipment involved in such incidents start making the rounds on social media.
Thankfully no one lost their life in the February incidents although a lot of equipment and infrastructure took a proper beating.
Talk to your drivers and keep drilling in the safety message. You may not be able to cure stupid. It would be best to part ways with such folks. But you might help dispel complacency, and everyone gets to go home to their loved ones.
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