CAA Manitoba is warning drivers to be more aware of their surroundings after two tow truck drivers were nearly hit on the roads Monday night.
A spokesperson said the separate incidents happened about a half an hour apart.
“The one driver, the truck passed him so quickly he jumped into a snowbank to avoid the truck,” Liz Kulyk, with CAA Manitoba, said. “The next one was one of our contractors and he got clipped by the side view mirror of a truck that was passing, so he actually was physically contacted by somebody’s car.”
Kulyk is reminding drivers it is the law to move over and slow down when passing vehicles parked with emergency lights on.
“If you’re driving in an 80 km/h zone, slow down to 60 km/h and you have to give one lane of space at minimum,” Kulyk said. “If you’re in a 60 km/h zone or less, you slow down to 40 km/h and you give one lane of space at minimum.”
She said violating these rules can run drivers up to $2,000 in fines and two demerit points but it’s a difficult rule to enforce unless police are staking out tow truck drivers.
Safety for employees is a recurring issue for CAA and Kulyk said the company regularly runs out its safety triangles that mark out where drivers are working.
“We buy 7,000 of those triangles every year and we turn over the whole set every year, because I kid you not, we probably go through a dozen a day,” she said. “People run over them – it’s just the close calls are happening so frequently now…In one of the situations (Monday) the driver blew right over his triangles. The whole set of five triangles were completely smashed.”