Ontario Provincial Police have re-opened all eastbound lanes on Highway 401 near Cambridge after a fatal collision between three commercial trucks.
All eastbound lanes on the highway were closed at Cedar Creek Road while emergency crews tended to the incident for most of the morning and afternoon on Friday.
The lanes reopened around 5 p.m., nearly 10 hours after the collision occurred.
OPP Sgt. Kerry Schmidt initially said that “at least one person” was trapped in the wreck but later confirmed that the victim had died at the scene.
“Air ambulance was on scene waiting to transport and the fire department was trying to extricate and unfortunately he has passed at the collision scene itself,” Schmidt said in a Periscope.
“We have our collision reconstruction team on scene right now beginning the work of the investigation. We still have obviously a lot of work left to do.”
OPP identified the victim of the crash as 59-year-old Abdual Waheed from Ajax.
Schmidt said the crash has caused an “unbelievable amount of damage" and scattered “debris everywhere.”
While the cause of the collision is still under investigation, Schmidt suggested that driver inattention could be a possibility.
“I am not sure the circumstances yet but it was rush hour traffic and in a construction area as well,” he said. “So like the commissioner said yesterday at a press conference regarding recent truck fatalities, driver inattention is at its worst and this could potentially be something similar to what we have seen in the past.”
Yesterday, OPP Commissioner Vince Hawkes called attention to a recent spike of “completely preventable” collisions involving “inattentiveness” from transport truck drivers.
He also announced new charges laid against three transport truck drivers in three separate fatal highway crashes.
Hawkes said all three incidents shared dangerous commonalities in their circumstances and resulted in “catastrophic crash scenes that claimed the life of more than one person.”
So far in 2017, 67 people have died in 56 collision involving transport trucks in Ontario.
Today’s incident would make that number 68.