By Don Urquhart, Times Chronicle
A fully loaded semi-trailer truck driving westbound on Hwy. 3 near Mule Deer Drive failed to negotiate a hairpin curve and went off the highway at approximately 10:30 p.m. Sunday night.
The truck went into the hillside next to the highway near the emergency runaway lane, nearly flipping its load of frozen chicken onto the highway, according to the Anarchist Mountain Fire Department (AMFD) which attended the scene.
AMFD Chief Urs Grob said: “the driver was fortunate not to have lost his load in this accident.”
Photo courtesy of Anarchist Mountain Fire Department (AMFD).
A driver and passenger appeared to be uninjured on-scene and traffic was reduced to alternating, one lane for 3.5 hours. The AMFD was on scene for over four hours and the highway was closed for approximately one hour for the recovery of the tractor trailer unit.
The recovery effort to move the truck and trailer required two heavy wrecker tow trucks – one each from Osoyoos and Grand Forks.
And in a related twist Grob added that an Anarchist resident had informed them just recently of someone camping at the end of one of the runaway lanes (but not this particular one). “If a large truck had to use one of these lanes, it would have been catastrophic for the campers. People need to use common sense when they stop along the highway to sleep,” he added.
Bad campsite selection: A local resident of Anarchist Mountain snapped this photo of someone camping recently in one of the emergency runaway lanes on Hwy. 3. Photo courtesy of Alena Bajkov.
Runaway lanes in B.C. come in various lengths and grades, with different materials and features designed to stop out-of-control vehicles. These include Gravity Bed Runaway Lanes, such as those found on Hwy. 3 over Anarchist Mountain, which leads a truck up a slope and typically uses a combination of gravity and a bed of gravel to slow the truck down and keep it from sliding backwards.
An Arrester Bed with cable nets or gravel bed is the other main type which relies on a cable netting system and/or a gravel bed to slow down the truck on either a horizontal or descending grade.
