RCMP collision analysis draws on many factors

After a motor vehicle collision late last year, the Trenton Connector was closed for several hours. This is typical for collisions involving serious injuries or death, with Sgt. Chris Romanchych, who leads RCMP Collision Analysis and Reconstruction Services (CARS) in the province and is based in Halifax, noting the road can be closed anywhere from six to eight hours as they analyze the scene.

He described what happens during that time in a recent interview.

“This is a specialized skill set. Not everybody has the skills to go and look and see the dynamics of the collision and how the vehicle or vehicles have interacted with each other,” he said, adding that his team provides expertise to investigators.

Two investigations happen at the same time, Romanchych said. One of them focuses on things like taking statements and breath samples, while the CARS investigation looks at physical evidence such as tire marks, gouges, damage and the debris field.

With two people on call for the province, collision analysts will often have to travel from other parts of Nova Scotia to the scene and will do a walk-through when they arrive to locate evidence and identify it. Using numbered markers to keep track of things that show what the vehicle was doing, they record it all and “collect everything we can there because as soon as we start moving vehicles, we degrade the evidence.”

They’re also sometimes able to get information from air bag control modules.

“A lot of people get concerned about this,” Romanchych said, referring to privacy.

Their primary purpose, he stressed, is to decide whether the airbag should be deployed, and a second purpose may be to record a few seconds of data before a collision, such as speed, whether the brakes were engaged and if a seatbelt is being worn.

“There’s nothing in that data that would identify who the driver is. There’s nothing in there that would record voices or conversations in the car.”

He said all information they collect helps the primary investigators decide if charges should be laid, and helps with enforcement later. Romanchych named seatbelt non-compliance as an example, adding that if several crashes had that as an issue, the RCMP could “upgrade enforcement initiatives.”

It can take approximately 40 hours to complete a report on a scene, he said.

“We need to articulate what we saw,” he said about the report, adding that it describes the evidence, road conditions, and vehicle damage as well as provides analysis.

Romanchych said CARS typically responds to more than 100 scenes a year.