A second runaway truck ramp is now in the works for Mount Vernon Canyon – the site of a wreck involving a semi truck that killed four, injured 10, and prompted a 100+ year sentence of the truck driver.
The initial wreck occurred in April 2019 in Jefferson County, Colorado on Interstate 70 in Mount Vernon Canyon. The truck driver, Rogel Aguilera-Mederos, was sentenced to 110 years in prison in December of 2021, promoting outrage from the trucking community. Aguilera-Mederos’ sentence was later reduced to 10 years by the Colorado Governor to “end the drama” surrounding the case.
Now, Colorado engineers are looking to install a second runaway truck ramp in addition to the current ramp that Rogel missed to prevent such a tragic incident from happening again.
“When you lost your brakes your mind is blocking,” Rogel said in an interview at the Jefferson County Jail when asked why he didn’t use the runaway truck ramp at the time of the crash.
The new ramp will be installed on I-70 between the Morrison and C-470 exits on the left side of the roadway, just below the existing ramp. The existing ramp will also be shortened to make the entrance more visible to drivers and entrance lights will be installed.
“If we had had this second ramp, might this tragedy have been avoided?” said CBS4 investigator Rick Sallinger in an interview with CDOT engineer Kevin Brown.
“That’s what we are thinking,” Brown said. “There will be another accident, another tragic crash, if we do nothing.”
Construction of the ramp is intended to begin later this year.