When Justin van Damme heard a bus full of seniors crashed on a Trans-Canada Highway intersection near Carberry, Man., last week┬аit was like he was transported back in time.
He was just 12 years old when his mother sat him and his sister down to break the news тАФ┬аtheir┬аgrandparents had died in a car crash at an uncontrolled Highway 1 intersection.┬а
“It was very surreal,” van Damme said. “You don’t expect to lose them both at once.”
The Winnipeg musician’s grandparents, Percy and Noreen Shepherd,┬аwere out for an afternoon drive that day in 1999, heading south toward Highway 1.
The couple crossed┬аthe westbound lanes of the Trans-Canada┬аbut were hit as they┬аdrove across┬аthe eastbound lanes.
Twenty-four years later, the news of a similar crash on Highway 1 at Highway 5 тАФ short drive east of where his grandparents died тАФ hit van Damme hard.
“It brought all those feelings rushing back in,” he said.┬а
Percy Shepard was a former Anglican minister “with a booming voice and a great sense of humour,” van Damme said, adding his grandmother, Noreen, was incredibly kind.
“And the two of them, just so in love,” he said.
Last week’s crash, which┬аkilled 15 people and injured 10, also got van Damme thinking about how highway intersections can be safer┬аso that tragedy doesn’t strike again.
“At some point you do have to recognize that there’s a trend,” he said.
“It’s maybe frustrating that it keeps happening, but frustrating┬аis probably not a strong enough way to say it when you see a trend of something negative happening. It’s on policymakers to address it,” he said.
Van Damme said adding a stop light at Highway 5 or dropping the speed limit more could help.
“It can be expensive┬аbut I think you have to look at areas where there’s a cause for concern, and you actually have to recognize that there’s an issue┬аand act.”
David Henry, a truck driver of about 35 years, said he wasn’t surprised to learn about the crash last week┬аgiven how busy that intersection is.
“It’s an intersection where high speed traffic, high volume traffic┬атАж [feeds] into the main highway,” he said. “There’s near-misses every day there, and it’s not a pleasant intersection.”
At-grade intersections, like the one where the bus crashed last week and van Damme’s grandparents died, are commonplace in the Prairies┬аbut Henry said they shouldn’t be part of the Trans-Canada Highway.
“That’s something that bothers me,” he said. “I want interchanges so that it’s much safer.”
And if nothing changes, Henry said the tragedies will continue.
“There’s going to keep being fatalities. There’s fatalities all around these highways,” he said.
But David Phillips, who has been a truck driver for about 32 years, said making changes to Highway 1 intersections wouldn’t necessarily mean less deaths.
“No matter what you put there, it’s not gonna change anything because it’s about the driver that’s behind the wheel,” he said.┬а
And the cost to potentially make them safer also might not be worth it.
“You’re talking billions of dollars because you would have to do them at every single intersection that crosses the highway,” Phillips said.┬а
Following Thursday’s crash, Manitoba’s Infrastructure Minister Doyle Piwniuk┬аsaid his team will look into the incident and make any improvements needed.
“We always review the situation and will make sure that we do a study and тАж make sure that if there’s anything else we can improve on in that the intersection┬аwe will definitely look at that,” Piwniuk┬аsaid in an interview with CBC News.
In the meantime, van Damme┬аreminds those grieving the loss of their loved ones that there is hope.
“It does get better,” he said.
