‘We should never count him out’
Authorities call steep, swerving road ‘one of our trouble spots’
“I think the only thing that matters now is his well-being.” Jay Monahan PGA Tour commissioner
Read more from Monahan. In Sports
The road that nearly hurled Tiger Woods to his death Tuesday has been a speed and death trap for decades.
The speed limit is 45 mph, but the road moves downhill quickly. It slopes and swerves. One sheriff ’s deputy said he’s clocked cars going more than 80 mph.
“I couldn’t tell you how many tickets in the past year, but we regularly cite people for speed on that section of Hawthorne Boulevard,” Los Angeles County Sheriff ’s Lt. Michael White told USA TODAY Sports. “It’s a steep downhill grade, and it’s steep enough to warrant two runaway truck lanes.”
Tuesday, Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva noted “that area has a high frequency of accidents.”
The street runs through Rolling Hills Estates and Rancho Palos Verdes, two peninsular cities less than 15 miles west of Long Beach in Los Angeles County.
Woods, the famed golfer, was wear
ing his seat belt and driving north Tuesday morning when he hit the median and flipped his SUV, triggering a 911 call from a neighbor. Woods needed to be extricated from the vehicle, put on a backboard and sent to a hospital to treat broken bones in his right leg, foot and ankle.
“It’s very fortunate that Mr. Woods was able to come out of this alive,” said Carlos Gonzalez, the sheriff ’s deputy who was first to arrive at the scene of the accident to help Woods, 45.
Gonzalez called that stretch of roadway “one of our trouble spots.”
Villanueva said there was no evidence of impairment and weather was not a factor. He said there was evidence that speed played a role, based on the fact the vehicle landed several hundred feet from where it crossed the median. Officials did not say how fast Woods was driving.
This is part of the road’s history, which includes runaway trucks and emergency lanes for such trucks to escape if necessary. White said semitrucks are required to use that roadway to exit the peninsula and they have used those runaway lanes, though he didn’t know how frequently.
In 1986, the Los Angeles Times reported that there was an average of two to four accidents a year involving runaway trucks on “steep Hawthorne and Crenshaw boulevards,” which prompted Rolling Hills Estates to call for better controls on defective commercial vehicles.
The newspaper reported on a crash a few years before then in which three people were incinerated when an out-of-control concrete truck “careened down a steep grade on Hawthorne Boulevard and flattened the front of a small car at Palos Verdes Drive North, touching off a gasoline explosion.”
That’s not far from where Woods’ car landed Tuesday.
Another truck in the 1980s lost its brakes on Hawthorne and “took out trees, telephone poles and 18 cars before the driver deliberately crashed into the center divider within Torrance’s city limits,” according to the Times.
A sheriff’s deputy at that time said something that sounded much like what Gonzalez said Tuesday.
“The most serious injury was a broken ankle,” said Deputy Dan Calhoun, traffic investigator at the sheriff ’s Lomita Station. “We’re lucky no one was killed.”
No data on accidents in this area could be immediately obtained. In 2012, a sheriff’s deputy told the Palos Verdes Peninsula News that he estimated there was at least one fatality a month on the larger peninsula that he patrolled and noted that Hawthorne Boulevard is one of the worst areas, where drivers, usually male, sometimes exceeded 90 mph.
It’s not known what caused Woods to lose control. The investigation is ongoing. Gonzalez said Tuesday that sometimes it’s a case of “people see a nice stretch of road and maybe they are not watching their speedometer.”
Claudia Gamio, 69, knows much about it. She has lived in the area for 43 years and said she heard the crash Tuesday and saw Woods’ golf clubs scattered around the car. She said accidents are common along Hawthorne Boulevard.
“You’d think they’d be able to do something about it,” she said.