Last week, my colleague Eric Needs wrote an informative and chilling piece on how the Senate may make truck safety standards worse. Beginning today and running through next week, I’ll be writing a series of posts on why the trucking industry needs tighter control, not looser regulation as the Senate is planning.
Last week, my colleague Eric Needs wrote an informative and chilling piece on how the Senate may make truck safety standards worse. Beginning today and running through next week, I’ll be writing a series of posts on why the trucking industry needs tighter control, not looser regulation as the Senate is planning.
Part one of this series is called Balder’s Story and if this doesn’t:
- Piss you off,
- Touch your heart, and/or
- Make you hug your kids/loved ones
I think you may be dead and just not know it.
Balder’s story began on January 27, 2014, a bitter cold night in Illinois. Douglas Balder, an Illinois State Trooper, was in his 2011 Crown Victoria, reds & blues flashing and flashers lit. He was there to help a trucker whose rig had stalled in the right land of the Ronald Reagan Memorial Tollway.
He wasn’t alone. There was a bright yellow Tollway assistance vehicle on the scene with its amber hazard lights burning and a huge blinking arrow, as well as a heavy-duty tow truck. Flares were properly placed on the pavement and blazing into the night. Visibility was perfect at around 10 miles.
Balder, father of two and a Navy reservist, had the Crown Vic’s heater on high to combat the minus-30-degree wind chill. He didn’t know it, but soon, the cold would be his best friend. Trooper Balder was about to be set on fire.
A flat-bed truck, hauling three gigantic rolls of steel, each weighing 14,580 pounds, was flying down the Tollway. Its driver, Renato Velasquez, was oblivious to the flares, the flashers, the blinking arrow and Balder’s reds and blues. According to a National Transportation Safety Board investigation, Velasquez didn’t take evasive action until it was way too late. He slammed into Balder’s cruiser at 63mph. A court later found that Velasquez was falling asleep at the wheel.
Balder’s cruiser was thrown into a ditch at the side of the road, trunk crushed, gas tank exploded. His face hit the steering wheel, knocking him unconscious.
Meanwhile on the road, the three steel coils snapped their chains. One hit the Tollway assistance vehicle’s cab, killing its driver, 39-year-old Vincent Petrella, instantly. Agron Xhelaj, the stalled rig’s driver, was injured as he sat beside Petrella.
In the ditch, Balder finally regained consciousness. He said, “I woke up a short time later on fire. Literally on fire. Burning alive.”
He had no clue how he got there at the time. He only knew that his cruiser was half destroyed and that gasoline and flames were spreading through the cruiser’s interior. He later recounted that his only thoughts were of making it out alive and of Kimberlie, his wife of 14 years, whose name he was screaming.
He said, “A certain degree of that was emotion at the moment, knowing that I might die, screaming to the last person you might love.”
Survival instincts kicked in and Balder began escape attempts, like radioing for assistance. In the meantime, the fire spread from the partition behind him, setting his back, head and legs ablaze. Neither the driver’s side door nor the window would open, but the button on his armrest did lower the passenger window.
He later said, “As that cold air came in and swirled that air around, adrenaline set in, and I flew out. The only other choice was to sit there and die.”
Balder hit the snow, performing the time-proven “stop-drop-and-roll” to put out the flames. Over one third of his body had been badly burned. He slowly worked his way out of the ditch to find local police on the scene.
Balder said, “You got this guy walking up with his skin hanging off his arm. My pants were all burned off to the skin.”
He survived, but the fight was far from over. Balder was in a medically-induced coma for six weeks, spent three months in hospital and endured ten surgeries, plus intense rehab.
Balder has had a lot of time since then to think about the accident and why it happened. On one level, it was simply due to a criminally negligent driver pushing himself too hard for too long. Balder also realized that, at a deeper level, it was indicative of a disturbing trend in highway safety. Years of progress in that area were being erased and the United States Congress was helping the trucking industry do the deed. Safety rules were being loosened and rolled back at the same time that trucking companies were pushing their rigs and drivers harder than ever before.
Yet the trucking industry believed that even less safety regulation was needed. In 2014, the industry found the perfect mouthpiece for its cause: Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine).
In part two tomorrow, we’ll examine the end-run around proper procedure that the industry and its patsy almost got away with and the shocking and horrifying reasons they failed… then.
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