Police: Inattentive truck drivers “on notice”, charges filed, after crashes kill six

This morning the Ontario Provincial Police held a news conference to announce that inattentive commercial truck drivers are “on notice” following a string of recent crashes that left six people dead.

Police Charge Three Truck Drivers In Deadly Crashes

At a press conference in Toronto today, OPP Commissioner J.V.N. Hawkes announced serious charges against three truck drivers who they say were responsible for three deadly crashes in the span of a week this summer. OPP says that driver inattention was to blame for all of the crashes.

Hawkes stated, “Each of these incidents resulted from an inattentive commercial truck driver slamming into the line of either slow or stopped traffic. This is driver inattention at its worst and the most tragic example of the tremendous cost when a transport truck driver is not paying full attention to the road or is fatigued.”

From an OPP news release detailing the series of crashes:

“Two of the collisions occurred on Highway 401, one near Port Hope on August 3, 2017, and the other in Chatham Kent on July 30, 2017. The third collision occurred on Highway 48 in the Town of Georgina on July 27, 2017.

In all three incidents, a transport truck travelling on a highway crashed into the back of traffic that was stopped or had slowed down due to road construction or a collision ahead. The collisions resulted in double fatalities that collectively claimed the lives of four men, one woman and a youth who were all occupants in vehicles at the end of the traffic queue. Several other people, including a 10-year-boy, were seriously injured in the crashes.”

Here is a chart detailing the charges announced against the truck drivers.

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Hawkes did acknowledge that many truckers are very safe, but says that law enforcement will be focusing on those who aren’t: “Many, many truck drivers are some of the safest drivers we have on the highway. It is those truck drivers that are driving inattentively and are distracted drivers (that are a danger) and they are driving in essence a time bomb that is traveling down the highway. Those are the guys that we need to get.”