Puslinch man accused of bribing officer after suspected impaired driving
I don’t know how much he offered them, but perhaps they should have taken it. The OPP will need all the cash it can get when it inevitably gets sued by everyone impacted by the accidents at the flyover.
The flyover on Highway 7/8 was plowed and salted in the hours between two vehicles launching off snow embankments and on to the road below, says OPP Sgt. Kerry Schmidt.
The OPP were called to two incidents Monday morning — one of them fatal — involving vehicles hitting snow banked onto the side of the flyover by snowplows, plunging over the side, and onto their roofs.
“The lanes themselves had been plowed, had been salted. It’s an elevated platform, and you need drivers to drive through the conditions. They’re preventable crashes. The road conditions and the weather conditions don’t cause crashes. It’s poor driving in those conditions that causes that,” Schmidt said.The first crash, at about 2 a.m., involved a taxi driver, who went over the embankment near the end of the flyover and flipped onto Highway 8.
The driver was taken to Hamilton General Hospital with minor injuries and was later released from hospital.
Five and a half hours later, a 38-year-old Waterloo woman drove her RAV 4 Hybrid up a snow embankment, before dropping near King Street East below. She was pronounced dead at the scene.“It comes down to driver error as well, with driving too fast for conditions, losing control,” Schmidt said, adding it’s a tragedy what happened to the woman.
“I don’t want to just blame it on the driver. But the lanes actually were in good shape.”
“The conditions to close a road would be when the roads are impassable, and this was certainly not the case. Traffic was driving on it all night and throughout the weekend until these two people lost control in the snow and ramped off the snowbank,” he said.
Schmidt noted the first crash, involving the taxi driver, can be credited to human error as well.
“If you drive on the shoulder and you lose control, it’s got to be driver error. Unless there’s a mechanical error, unless there’s something else. But the roads were plowed. Everything was looking good,” he said.
I agree that plenty of people have no idea how to drive in the winter. I’ve had the misfortune of being in cars with some of them. And yes, snowbanks on the sides of highways and whatnot aren’t uncommon. But to just come straight out and say that multiple people launching themselves to their doom on the same stretch of road just a few hours apart was absolutely 100% driver error, no question about it before there could be any real investigation? You’d better have your ducks in a row before you make a statement like that, my man.
I don’t always have the best memory, so maybe it doesn’t mean a whole lot that I can’t recall the last time I heard about someone driving off of that thing. And were it just one, maybe we could write it off as human error and move on with our lives. But two? That’s a pretty big coincidence, and one dismissive statement isn’t going to convince me or many others that there couldn’t have been anything else wrong up there.