There’s a story in my area where very early one morning, not long after the bars closed, two diligent and community minded law enforcement officers, a CHP officer and a Deputy Sheriff, responded to a single vehicle roll-over traffic collision on a rural mountain road, at a location frequently referred to as Deadman’s Curve. A location of countless crashes—some fatal.
Several miles of the road were being rehabilitated, with a handful of widening improvements. At the time of this collision, the old roadway had been removed down to dirt, and regrading had commenced. Tall slender wooden stakes with ribbons of colored plastic tape clearly marked the location of the future roadway. Here, it retained Deadman’s Curve.
After the driver and sole occupant of the vehicle had been whisked away by ambulance, and while waiting for a tow truck to arrive, the scene had to be examined and investigated. On that dark moonless night, illuminated only by bright flashlights shining down the row of flagged stakes, an error was obvious. Surely an engineer somewhere in a far to cozy office failed to realize that if those stakes had been moved just a skosh more to the west, Deadman’s Curve would no longer exist.
To this day, I believe the public still thanks the County for straightening out that old curve.
And in some mysterious way, they are correct. 😉
