When Justin van Damme heard a bus full of seniors crashed on a Trans-Canada Highway intersection near Carberry, Man., last week it 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 — their grandparents had died in a car crash at an uncontrolled Highway 1 intersection.
“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, were out for an afternoon drive that day in 1999, heading south toward Highway 1.
The couple crossed the westbound lanes of the Trans-Canada but were hit as they drove across the eastbound lanes.
Twenty-four years later, the news of a similar crash on Highway 1 at Highway 5 — short drive east of where his grandparents died — hit van Damme hard.
“It brought all those feelings rushing back in,” he said.
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 killed 15 people and injured 10, also got van Damme thinking about how highway intersections can be safer so 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 is 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 but 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 and act.”
David Henry, a truck driver of about 35 years, said he wasn’t surprised to learn about the crash last week given how busy that intersection is.
“It’s an intersection where high speed traffic, high volume traffic … [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 but 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.
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.
Following Thursday’s crash, Manitoba’s Infrastructure Minister Doyle Piwniuk said 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 … make sure that if there’s anything else we can improve on in that the intersection we will definitely look at that,” Piwniuk said in an interview with CBC News.
In the meantime, van Damme reminds those grieving the loss of their loved ones that there is hope.
“It does get better,” he said.
