'Crash should be a wakeup call'

When you’re on your way home from the beach, hopping in the back of your friend’s pickup truck might seem like a good idea.

It’s sunny out, and the breeze is nice on your face. You’re tired from a day of swimming and lying around in the heat.

Maybe you’ve been drinking a bit as well, so you’re feeling careless. You don’t care you are being loosely jolted around in the back.

Suddenly the truck you’re riding in begins to sharply turn onto a side street, and it doesn’t make the road. It hits the side of a ditch and you can feel the vehicle losing balance.

In what seems like slow motion, the truck starts to flip over. You are thrown out of the back, and the force of the impact makes you hit the gravel hard.

This scenario may seem far-fetched, but it isn’t—this exact thing happened in Duncan on Wednesday, when a red Chevy S10 pickup flipped into a ditch turning on Peters Road.

The truck was trying to turn right onto Koksilah Road around 6:30 p.m., and eyewitnesses said there were three people in the back when the accident occurred.

They were thrown out of the moving vehicle and taken to hospital with non-life threatening injuries.

The driver has been charged with driving violations, but the cause of the accident hasn’t been released yet.

There is a chilling comparison—last year, the same type of accident occurred, and the passengers weren’t so lucky.

In the first week of July, a 26-year-old Duncan man was killed after he fell out of a pickup truck.

Eric John Blasko was sitting on a cooler in the back with his brother. They had just gone tubing in Skutz Falls, and were on their way to take another run.

The driver of the truck veered to the right to make room for a driver on River Bottom Road to make room for another vehicle, and Blasko fell out of the truck.

He was taken to the Cowichan District Hospital in Duncan and pronounced dead.

Cnst. Dave Hay with the South Island Traffic Service has seen his share of accidents with people unsecured in the back of pickup trucks.

He said the passengers in the red Chevy should be thankful they weren’t more seriously injured, and this crash should be “a wakeup call,” he said.

“This time the occupants are still alive, but probably should not have been,” he said. “When someone is thrown from a moving vehicle, they end up violently impacting anything in the trajectory.

“I’ve seen what’s left of the human body when it slides down the highway, ending up looking like raw meat that someone attacked with a power grinder. It turns your stomach,” he said.

And even if passengers survive being thrown out of the back of a truck, “you could end up spending the rest of your life living with horrible scars, broken bones, or paralysis,” he said.

Hay notes that famous paraplegic athlete Rick Hanson, who spent time living in Williams Lake, B.C., sustained his spinal cord injury from riding in the back of a pickup. He was paralyzed from the waist down from the accident.

The bottom line is it’s foolish and dangerous to ride in the back of a truck, or allow your passengers to do so, said Hay.

“Do not carry passengers in a pickup truck box. It’s for cargo, not people you care about,” he said.

Passengers not seated properly can be issued a $167 ticket, along with the driver of the vehicle, adds Hay.