Commonwealth Chronicle

From Cameron’s blog:

Below is an in-depth broadcast piece on the dangers of Interstate 81 in Virginia that I created last spring.

I-81 used to be a state-of-the-art expressway in the 1960s, but now there’s an average of 20,000 trucks traveling  the road per day. High truck traffic, mountainous terrains and closed rest stops make I-81 one of the deadliest interstates, according to the Virginia Transportation Research Council. One family from Atlanta, Georgia understands the dangers of I-81 all too well.

Searching for safety: Short-term solutions?

In 2002, Steve Owings and his wife Susan made their way up the corridor only a few months after Cullum’s death. On their way to visit Pierce at W&L, they were shocked and sickened at the congestion and the speed with which vehicles flew past them.

Owings knew something had to change. In 2003, after the resolution of the criminal case against the man who hit his sons’ car, Owings founded Road Safe America, a research and advocacy group promoting safer interstate driving. Since then, the Owings family has worked tirelessly to spread their message through speeches, collaboration with the American Trucking Associations and the Road Safe America Web site.

The top, shared priority of Road Safe America and the ATA is to limit the speed that tractor-trailers can drive by requiring the use of speed governors. All trucks are required to have the regulators, but most trucking companies do not require their drivers to program them.

Owings said he thinks limiting a truck’s top speed to 65 mph is essential to make I-81 – and all interstates – safer.
“An 80,000-pound vehicle traveling just 60 mph has the force of the average car going over 300 mph,” he said.

He said that Road Safe America and the ATA have pursued mandatory programming of speed governors through state departments of transportation for years. But their best hope might lie with Congress. The Safe, Accountable, Flexible and Efficient Transportation Equity Act – better known as the highway bill – is up for renewal in September. That’s the bill that is renewed every six years to authorize federal funding of all transportation in the United States. Owings hopes that the Obama administration and the Democratic majority in Congress will support the speed governor proposal.

But Fontaine said that speed governors might not be as safe as Owings and the ATA suggest. Fontaine cites speed variance as a main crash cause on interstates like 81, and he thinks speed governors could create situations where tractor trailers act as “rolling road blocks.”

“I think you can’t really say that there should be a global blanket of 65 mph on the limiters,” said Fontaine. “Ideally, your safest mode of operation on the road is everybody’s driving about the same speed.”

Owings agrees that forcing trucks to drive at a slower speed in the right lane isn’t a quick fix. Ideally, he said, trucks and cars shouldn’t even share the same space. But for now, he’s lobbying for short-term solutions like the speed governors and adding a “sharing the road” program to driver education courses. The program would teach high school students how to drive around big trucks.

Del. Cline said part of his short-term safety solutions for I-81 includes those new driver education programs. But he thinks the best way to improve safety on the Interstate is stricter enforcement. He is trying to get money set aside in the General Assembly to put more troopers on patrol along I-81.

But it costs $100,000 to outfit one new trooper, Cline said.

VDOT is also working to put band-aids over some of I-81’s smaller safety wounds. Matt Shiley, a regional traffic engineer for VDOT, said that highway safety features like rumble strips, electronic message boards and the Highway Safety Corridor running through the Roanoke area of I-81 all improve safety day to day. The safety corridor, where speed limits are lower, is sometimes criticized for increasing area congestion. But it has helped bring the crash rate down, said Shiley.

Bridge and interstate redesign projects also help improve safety in the danger zones of I-81. In 2005, Buffalo Creek Bridge was one such project, put on the to-do list after the Owings tragedy. The bridge was rebuilt with wider shoulders, and a northbound truck climbing lane was added.

Visiting W&L for alumni weekends is always bittersweet, Pierce Owing said, partly because of the I-81 drive that will always haunt him.

“Is 81 a bad interstate? Absolutely,” he said. “In terms of the interstates I travel on, and you know I live in Atlanta – I travel on them every day – it’s one of the worst.” (to be continued)

The safety hazards: congestion, climate, conditions

I-81’s status as Virginia’s most dangerous interstate raises the stakes for students who attend the 29 universities along its 325-mile corridor in the state.

In 2002, Cullum Owings, then a senior at W&L, was one of those student drivers. Steve Owings said he and his wife Susan had talked with their sons before they left about the dangers of sitting still on the Interstate.

“We talked about it that morning: ‘When you come to stopped traffic, which you undoubtedly will, try to leave enough space in front of your car so that you can maneuver and look in the rear view mirror,’” Owings recalled.

And Pierce said that’s exactly what Cullum tried to do when he noticed the 18 wheeler’s headlights barreling toward them. But everything happened too fast. Cullum had only managed to turn the 1992 Lexus just enough for the driver’s side to take the brunt of the impact.

“I couldn’t even get him out,” Pierce said. “Ambulance was there within 10 to 15 minutes; they couldn’t get him out either. They tried to back up the truck. And I think he died in my arms.”

Robert Foresman, Rockbridge County’s emergency management and hazardous materials coordinator for the past seven years, can spin off a laundry list of I-81’s trucking horror stories.

“In 1999 there was a major crash on the Buffalo Creek Bridge that involved 17 vehicles. We had 35 patients with four fatalities,” he began. That was only a mile or so from the site of Cullum Owings’ death.

That accident claimed the life of another student, freshman Jonathan Nabors.

As Rockbridge County’s emergency management coordinator, Foresman responds to any big rig accidents on the Interstate between mile markers 173 and 205.

Four people were killed in this 1999 accident that happened around the I-81 Buffalo Creek Bridge. The pile-up involved eight tractor-trailers and eight cars. (Photo: THE NEWS-GAZETTE)

“I think that the mountainous terrain, the way the road is banked and designed causes problems for drivers,” said Foresman.

Fontaine agrees. He said the high density of truck traffic on the interstate’s hilly terrain creates a huge inconsistency in the speeds that cars and trucks drive.In his research Fontaine found that trucks sometimes go as slow as 45 mph in the left lane as they go up hills, causing mile-long back-ups.

“Trucks have a disproportionate impact on the traffic flow along I-81, particularly when you get into these locations where you’ve got the hills and valleys going up and down the road,” Fontaine said.

That speed inconsistency is a major factor in I-81 crashes, he said.

And those are safety hazards that threaten everyone on the road. Virginia Delegate for the 24th District Ben Cline said many of his constituents worry about driving on I-81.

“Environmental concerns or congestion concerns or safety concerns: Everybody’s got some concern that relates to 81,” he said.

Jennifer Leech, a  Rockbridge County resident who is her father’s right-hand on the famiy’s third-generation dairy farm, said she is always nervous when she drives on I-81. She tries to avoid the cluttered lanes of the interstate if she can, opting instead to take the parallel US Route 11.

“Especially if I’m driving a truck with like a livestock trailer or something, I just stay on 11,” said Leech.

A 2006 graduate of Virginia Tech, she had to drive the 100-mile stretch of the Interstate between Lexington and Blacksburg every weekend when she was still in school.

Playing bumper cars with big trucks and careless passenger car drivers every weekend scared Leech. One Sunday morning, she said, she was run off the road into the median by a truck that was merging onto the interstate around Troutville, north of Roanoke.

“I guess he didn’t see me. I was in his blind spot, driving a little black car,” she said.

Leech found some areas, such as the Buffalo Creek Bridge near the site of Cullum Owings’ death and the exits surrounding Roanoke, were worse than others.

“If you went around work hours, around Roanoke, it got really, really busy and dangerous,” she said.  “You definitely had to pay attention to what you were doing.”

That sitting duck feeling is one Leech said she doesn’t want to experience again. Now she always speeds up when she is passing a truck on I-81.

Cline said there are many others just like Leech who refuse to drive on the corridor.

“So many folks from this area are scared to get on 81 anymore, they don’t even use it. They take (Route) 11 wherever they go,” he said. (to be continued)

Pierce Owings, left, spent most of his life following Cullum everywhere: to high school and then to college at Washington and Lee University, where he joined the same fraternity as Cullum, Sigma Alpha Epsilon. (Photo: STEVE OWINGS)

This story was originally published here.

Pierce Owings lost his big brother and best friend on the same night. On the Sunday after Thanksgiving in 2002, Cullum Owings died when a speeding tractor trailer rammed into his car on Interstate 81 a few miles from their destination.

Pierce, a passenger in the car, escaped from the accident virtually unscathed. He would be the only one to make it back to Washington and Lee University.

“It hit us like a freight train,” said Pierce, who after the crash looked over to find Cullum hunched beside him. At age 19, as he sat in the back of an ambulance on Interstate 81 near Lexington, Pierce had to call his parents and tell them their son, his brother, was gone.

“He was my best friend. I admired him,” said Pierce, now 25. “We were very close.”

Cullum Owings became another casualty on the list of 5,000 Americans who die every year in tractor-trailer-related crashes.

“That’s the equivalent of two airline crashes a month with everyone on board dying,” said Steve Owings, Pierce and Cullum’s father.

The trucker who caused the Owings’ crash was indicted on a charge of reckless driving, a criminal misdemeanor. He spent a month in jail, paid a $1500 fine and gave up his license for a year.

The steep grades and rocky bottoms of the truck-dense I-81 make it the deadliest of Virgnina’s five interstates, said Mike Fontaine, senior research scientist at the Virginia Transportation Research Council.

Last year, 22 of the almost 3,000 national fatal crashes involving big trucks happened on the Virginia corridor of I-81. Of the 65 fatal crashes on the corridor in the years 2005-2007, 25 of them involved at least one truck. That’s almost 40 percent of the fatal crashes during those three years.

On Interstate 95, which runs north-south through busy eastern Virginia, only 34 percent of fatal crashes involve at least one truck. And a mere 11 percent of Interstate 64’s fatal crashes involve a tractor trailer.

Fontaine, who provided those crash statistics, said that I-81 has the highest percentage of truck traffic in the Commonwealth. That’s a growing problem for an aging, four-lane interstate.

I-81 was built to accommodate 15 percent truck traffic during its 1960s heyday. Today, tractor-trailers are up to 40 percent of traffic. And passenger car congestion is growing fast, too, Fontaine said.

Traffic volume on most segments has more than tripled since 1975, according to Federal Highway Administration statistics. The steady traffic volume increase is due largely to the long-term economic expansion in industries and localities along the corridor.

And the deregulation of the trucking industry in 1980, which made it easier for new truck companies to get started and truckers to get licensed, quadrupled the number of trucks on the road.

The multiplying numbers of cars and trucks traveling I-81 will inevitably increase the frequency and severity of crashes, said Fontaine.

“Congestion and crashes tend to be highly correlated with one another,” he said.

Worse, crashes that do occur on the mountainous interstate are notorious for their severity.
Since Cullum Owings’ death the Virginia Department of Transportation has spent $62.5 million in Rockbridge County alone on widening bridges and adding truck lanes.

But long-term solutions will be costly – estimates range up to $13 billion and could take more than a decade. The federal six-year spending plan for interstate highways is up for renewal this year, but big-ticket items such as adding more lanes to I-81 or providing the money necessary to move more freight to the railroad are not likely to be a part of the bill in a down economy.

And the almost $700 million in stimulus money VDOT has received can be used only for “shovel-ready” projects – projects that do not need extensive planning and can be implemented immediately.

Worse, budget-cutting measures planned in Virginia could mean less overnight parking for weary truckers looking to get off the road for some sleep. (to be continued)