At the Carberry turnoff, the risks remain

Opinion

An emergency responder will tell you that the voices of a bad accident never leave the place where it happened. That pausing at a stop sign or a roadside memorial near an old accident scene can bring a lot of things flooding back.

Even time passing doesn’t change that: a year later, things can still be as fresh as when they happened, as if the intervening time has failed to change anything.

A year after a serious accident at Carberry lead to 17 deaths, first responders are still facing the fallout from that day.

Others are facing their own personal pain.

The families and friends of the injured and dead are still deeply affected by their personal losses, and whole towns — Carberry itself, whose firefighters responded to the scene, and Dauphin, where the busload of seniors who began what was supposed to be a simple pleasure trip to a casino — are remembering what happened on the Trans-Canada Highway a year ago. The kind of day that you can understand changes everything.

At the accident site itself, it’s harder to see the changes.

It’s still a simple stop sign where Highway 5 meets the Trans Canada, still the same welter of directions for drivers to look before crossing a broad expanse of divided highway, still the same number of drivers belting through between east and west, some obeying the speed limit, others, not. Still the same potential for driver confusion, distraction or even a simple misapprehension of risk.

If you aren’t aware of the crash, if you’re from another province and just passing through, the Carberry intersection is like so many other simple crossings of a major multi-lane highway. You don’t feel its particular latent danger or recognize its deadly record.

It’s just another prairie crossroad. You flash by not knowing that the most serious accident at Carberry, and all that fallout, was just one of the more recent accidents at that same spot.

Traversing the lead-up to the intersection on the Trans Canada and passing through the intersection itself is barely seconds of what, for many, is a long and bring driving day. You probably pay more attention to the roadside casino billboards than to any official signage about speed limit changes or “dangerous intersection ahead” warnings.

Will there be concrete improvements before the fall of 2026, as was promised by the former PC provincial government?

Right now, there aren’t answers from the current government on the time line.

A study to find a preferred redesign for a $12-million reconstruction of the intersection will start later this month, but the government has been silent about how long that work will take, and when it will now be done.

Those who know the intersection’s history drive through and perhaps shudder, and most certainly, they take more time and care at a dangerous intersection that has been claiming lives for a long time before last year’s calamity. Others bypass that particular intersection altogether.

And perhaps that constant awareness makes the intersection just a little bit safer.

But not safe enough.

If the government is listening, it’s time to move ahead more quickly.

Because every day that the Carberry intersection stays fundamentally the same as it was a year ago, is another day with every bit as much risk.

Yes, highway work is expensive and long-term and takes effective and thorough planning. Yes, it’s important to make the absolute best choice for the safest possible intersection.

But every day the intersection remains as it is, the risk remains as well.

For first responders, for families. For everyone.

» Winnipeg Free Press