Recent carnage involving big rigs raising concerns
You’d be forgiven for being leery of venturing onto Southwestern Ontario’s 400-series highways after four big rig pileups in less than two weeks.
But while the unlikely rash of truck crashes — two in ChathamKent, and two in Sarnia — sounds like the stuff of white-knuckle driving, it actually bucks the Ontario trend, according to provincial figures.
The number of truck-related deaths on Ontario highways is falling — down three per cent between 2010 and 2014 — while the number of big rigs on the roads rose by 12 per cent over the same period, according to the latest data available from the province’s Transportation Ministry.
But you’d never know by the recent carnage along the Southwestern Ontario corridor.
In Chatham-Kent, a pair of weekend crashes, both involving transport trucks near a construction zone, killed two people and sent several others to hospital.
On Sunday, Amherstburg ’s Lacie Brundritt, 42, and Kyle Brundritt, 14, were killed when a tractortrailer collided with their Chevy Sierra pickup truck in the westbound lanes of Highway 401 near Dillon Road. Lacie and Kyle were passengers.
The pickup truck’s driver, a 39-year-old male, was airlifted to hospital with serious injuries. Another 12-year-old male passenger was taken to hospital with non-life threatening injuries.
That six-vehicle crash occurred when the transport hit the rear of the pickup and its camper trailer — causing a chain reaction of collisions among vehicles stopped for a separate crash.
On July 19, a 61-year-old truck driver from Alabama was killed when a transport truck slammed into a line of big rigs on the Highway 402 waiting to cross the international Blue Water Bridge.
Days later on the same stretch of the 402, a three-transport truck pileup flipped one rig onto its side .
In Ontario, large truck crashes account for one in five road deaths, second only to pedestrian collisions. But only 33 per cent of truck drivers involved in fatal crashes were driving improperly, according to ministry statistics from 2014.
It’s a number the Ontario Trucking Association wants to drive even lower. The association, which represents trucking companies across the province, wants to address both the driver error and mechanical issues that cause collisions.
From July 2014 to June 2017, defective trucks caused 344 collisions. Six were fatal, OPP statistics show.
Stephen Laskowski, president of the Ontario Trucking Association, said human error accounts for most at-fault accidents, which needs to become a big priority.
Speed governors, already standard on Ontario’s big rigs, have gone a long way to make roads safer, said Laskowski, who wants the government to take it one step further. He hopes electronic trucker driving logs will soon be mandatory.
There are other improvements, too. Transport Canada is making electronic stability control mandatory on all new big rigs, a feature that makes it harder for trucks to roll over in crash. In Ontario, mandatory entry level training was introduced by the government last month.
But road safety requires more than just diligent truckers, said Chatham-Kent OPP Const. Jay Denorer.
“Slow down, pay attention, don’t be distracted. Slow down in construction zones,” he said.