No charges following Highway One crash in Burnaby
Posted January 7, 2015 4:44 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
BURNABY (NEWS1130) – No charges have been laid following a crash that shut down Highway One in Burnaby for several hours this morning.
The accident, which involved a fuel tanker truck and a car, happened just after midnight near the Willingdon Avenue off-ramp.
For some, their normal commute time was doubled and in some cases many didn’t even make it into the office.
Ashok Bhatti with the Ministry of Transportation says digital message boards on the highway were activated to tell drivers of the delay and to take another road, but some of those alternate routes were already bumper-to-bumper and bogged down in construction.
“When we’re advertising to use alternate routes, we’re not specifically stating what those routes are and we’re not making assertions as to what is happening on those routes because most of those routes belong to the municipality,” says Bhatti.
“It’s unfortunate that that would happen and unfortunately with unplanned events like this you don’t necessarily plan around existing construction that’s happening along the corridors,” he adds.
Following this morning’s crash, several litres of fuel leaked from the tanker. There was some light fog at the time of the crash, but investigators are ruling out weather as a contributing factor.
An off-duty Burnaby RCMP officer was one of the first people on scene and was able to extricate the truck driver from his flipped over semi.
No one was hurt in the crash. The stretch of highway was closed for eight hours.
