Horrific Auto Accident a Sign of Things to Come…

London, ONThey were just three college kids on a break. Three teenaged girls, loved and respecter by their peers, simply out for a drive between classes—presumably out to grab a snack at the drive-thru, since it was lunchtime. A car accident was furthest from their minds.

But fate dictated that they never made it to the drive-thru. Instead, their car slammed into a dump truck that was sitting sideways in their lane. All three 18-year-old women were hospitalized, one seriously. Dayna Deleemans, Janisse LeClair and Ashley Pereira had to be cut from their vehicle. It took firefighters and paramedics an hour to extract them from the car, such was the force of the impact and the damage to the car, reduced to a mass of twisted metal with, somehow, three human beings inside.

All because a truck driver was allegedly driving carelessly. That's the charge, anyway.

It was 11:20 in the morning when the auto accident happened. The three women were heading southbound along Hickory Drive near Egremont Drive in Adelaide Metcalf when their car collided with a northbound dump truck. Somehow the truck driver had lost control of his heavy rig, and it was sitting sideways in the middle of the southbound lane when the women's car slammed into it.

It would be like hitting a brick wall—and that's with the dump truck empty. It is not known if the truck was loaded at the time.

The girls were doing everything they were supposed to be doing. All three were wearing seatbelts. And yet this. Deleemans, who was driving, and LeClair were sitting in the front seat and were critically injured. Pereira, however, was seated in back and sustained life-threatening injuries. The stricken teen was evacuated by air ambulance to hospital for emergency surgery.

What makes the auto accident even more tragic is the fact that the trio had just graduated from the same high school that was home to two other graduates who perished in a car crash in July just weeks after graduation. In that crash a third teen survived, but two 17-year-old youths lost their lives.

At last report the driver of the dump truck, a 65 year-old man from Strathroy, was charged with careless driving. He sustained minor injuries in the collision.

It is car crashes such as these that raise the noise to a fever pitch surrounding the wisdom of segregating cars and trucks onto different areas of the highway, separated by barriers. If that were the case, the northbound dump truck might have remained in the northbound lane, and not deviate in to the southbound lane where it would pose a threat, as it did, to a much smaller vehicle carrying three innocent people simply going about their day.

Instead, the car ran into a veritable brick wall that should not have been there. In such a scenario, no amount of seat belts or air bags could have saved the trio from serious injury.

Unless, of course, they were driving another dump truck. And how likely is that?

One of the reasons why SUV, and large pickup truck sales have been so popular in the US over the years is that the size made people feel safer. Now, spiking gas prices and other economic factors are forcing people into smaller vehicles. That just suggests that the carnage is going to get worse, before it gets better.

While the driver of the dump truck was identified as Keith Ireland, the owner and operator of the rig was not. Assuming that there will be a court case stemming from the horrific crash, the details will come out over time.