Winter is lingering in the West Kootenay region and in a year where the number of serious crashes has been high, Sgt. Chad Badry with the West Kootenay Traffic Services (WKTS) Road Safety Unit wants to remind drivers to be cautious out on the roads.
The WKTS unit covers an area from Rock Creek to the Kootenay Pass and from Nakusp to the U.S. border and Badry says it has been a bad year as far as serious crashes go throughout the whole region, both during the summer and the winter.
He also cautions against the instinct of automatically blaming accidents on road conditions.
“It is unfortunate that people jump to those conclusions. Maybe the odd time a contractor could do a little better to make it safer, but most of the time it is the drivers that need to adjust their speed,” said Badry.
“The other thing to think about with these crashes is — if we have one serious crash, how many other people are travelling on the road at that particular time that don’t crash. If you ask yourself that question, you will probably come to the conclusion — maybe they actually were driving more conservatively, adjusting to the road conditions.”
He warns that people tend to have too high of expectations for what road conditions will be like and don’t adjust their driving accordingly.
“The standard is not to have bare roads through the winter, that is not the contract standard at all,” said Badry. “Compact snow and ice should be expected on our winter roads — everybody needs to adjust how they drive.”
Badry reports that there hasn’t been one common contributing factor the many serious crashes this winter, but that the top three causes of all accidents in the area, regardless of time of year, remain distracted driving, impaired driving and speed.
He also pointed out that sometimes there just isn’t anything that a contractor can do to improve road conditions if temperatures are too low, de-icers will not work and if it is too windy, the sand will not stick.
People are usually curious as to the cause of accidents, but Badry explained that if an investigation is ongoing, or the RCMP are awaiting lab results, it is unlikely that they will release information about the cause of an accident right away.
As a final word of caution, Badry warned that once the worst of winter conditions is over, drivers shouldn’t become complacent as spring brings its own set of driving difficulties.
“We are going to see warmer temperatures at lower elevations during the day and at night things start to freeze, and as you change elevations, things start to freeze as well,” he explained. “We get slope in the road, the melt comes across the road, the road seems good and all of a sudden — you are in a corner or in a shadow where the temperatures come down faster and you are on ice.”