A 62-year-old man has died after a crash in northwestern New Brunswick.
The man was driving a tractor-trailer on Route 17 around noon Sunday near St. Jean Baptiste, about 100 kilometers east of Edmondston.
The highway was snowy and slippery, and while descending a small hill, the driver failed to make the turn and slid off a cliff into a stream, Kedgwick Fire Department Firefighter Veronica Columbus said.
“The snow was really wet so it was big white [sheet of] ice on the road,” she said Monday. “We had to pull off the road so we could see the big truck.”
Second fatal crash in a month
In a news release, RCMP said the Sainte-Anne-de-Madawaska man died at the scene from his injuries.
This is the second fatal crash on Route 17 in less than a month. Restigouche County and the greater northern New Brunswick community are calling on the province to do a better job clearing the roads.
The outcry was especially strong after a crash killed 20-year-old Richie Fournier and a 35-year-old man. Two more people were taken to hospital with serious injuries. This weekend, another crash on Route 11 near Karaket, in the northeast, killed two women.
Kedgwick Mayor Eric Gagnon told Radio-Canada that this is not the first crash in the area this winter. He and other Restigouche County mayors met with Transportation and Infrastructure Minister Jeff Carr to push for better road maintenance. A new meeting is expected in the coming weeks.
“The problem is that nothing has changed,” Gagnon said.
Columbus said she was surprised to see the crash this weekend on the stretch of highway just before Saint-Jean-de-Baptiste. She said she walks this way to work every day and it’s not a place she particularly watches.
“It’s usually fine,” she said. “But the road conditions were bad yesterday.”
The road was not cleared of snow
She said when firefighters arrived on scene, they asked the 911 team to immediately request a snow plow and a salt truck from the province.
She said she didn’t know why the road wasn’t cleared.
“It was dangerous snow,” she said.
Columbus said there were at least two crashes in the area that day. The first was minor and occurred shortly before the fatal crash.
In her experience, this has been a particularly bad winter for road conditions.
“It’s more rain than snow,” she said. “It’s been bad for a few years, but the weather doesn’t really help us.”
The driver was the only person in the tractor-trailer and no other vehicles were involved in the crash, RCMP said.
The New Brunswick Medical Examiner’s Office will perform an autopsy to determine the exact cause of the man’s death, RCMP said.
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