Highway collisions in Saskatchewan have occurred more often than usual this year. According to the Saskatchewan RCMP, from January to Nov. 8, there were 63 vehicle crashes, which led to 70 deaths.
Supt. Grant St. Germaine, Saskatchewan RCMP officer in charge of traffic services, said overall for the year, about 30 to 32 per cent of vehicle crashes are indicating that alcohol is a contributing factor, which is high.
“My biggest thought with it is the accidents being caused by people not paying attention to their driving, not paying attention to the rules of the road,” St. Germaine said. “I think a lot of cases like driver inattention, not paying attention to what they’re doing is a cause of a lot of these accidents.”
St. Germaine said incidents of drug use in vehicles this year are up about up about 250 per cent over last year.
But St. Germaine also said the weather change in the last few weeks does not help, as there has been an increase in crashes in the last three to four weeks.
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“That seems to be something that happens every year or whether the weather gets bad, people still don’t slow down,” he said. “So bad roads are certainly a contributing factor to some of these some of these crashes.”
On Wednesday morning, a bus transporting members of Shania Twain‘s crew was involved in a crash on Highway #1 near Wolseley, Sask., as they were headed to Saskatoon after wrapping up a show in Winnipeg.
Dwayne Stone, the fire chief for the Town of Grenfell, says firefighters and first responders were called out to the crash just after 7 a.m., where they had to break windows to free 13 people trapped in the bus.
“I would say extreme icy road conditions it looked like the bus lost control slide sideways in the ditch then caught some of the dirt and then rolled,” Stone said in an earlier interview.
In a Facebook post, Beat the Street USA stated the bus experienced black ice on the roadway, which caused the crash.
“All the passengers and driver are being evaluated for injuries and were immediately attended to by emergency responders and transported to the hospital for further treatment as needed,” stated Joerg Philipp, the owner of Beat the Street USA.
In the meantime, Saskatchewan RCMP urge motorists to pay attention to road conditions and to pay significant attention to the oncoming traffic.
“You need to be paying attention not just to your own driving, but to others driving on the roads at this time of the year, especially with the bad roads,” St. Germaine said. “Slow down and have a have a safe, safe trip on the road wherever you happen to be driving and obey the rules of the road.”
– with files from Brooke Kruger and Andrew Benson
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