A truck crash on Interstate 70 in Columbia Missouri killed two persons in a car when a tractor trailer carrying mail rear-ended the car and caused the vehicle to catch fire.
Authorities said a tractor-trailer carrying mail under contract with the U.S. Postal Service was traveling eastbound on I-70 at 3:30 a.m. when it struck the back end of a car just west of the Stadium Boulevard exit. The car caught fire, and the truck went off the roadway and struck an embankment. “The driver of the truck was identified as Jim Marchesi, 51, of Junction City, Kan., who was not injured, police said.
The response from the Columbia Fire Department included a “foam truck” that delivers large quantities of firefighting foam. Columbia fire fighters also called for a water tanker from the Boone County Fire Protection District because of the size of the fire. Firefighters arriving at the scene found the car covered in flames in the middle of the eastbound lanes. After the fire was extinguished, firefighters found a single deceased victim in the car.
This fatal accident unfortunately is too common of occurrence. Trucks weighing 50,000 pounds simply cannot stop as quickly as cars. Truckers have to drive the speed limit and keep an eye out for stopped or slowing traffic so that they have time to stop. When they don’t, the end result is usually fatal for the driver of the car. In a similar accident happened just 2 months ago on Interstate 44 outside St. Louis Missouri on a stretch of Interstate on which there have been numerous fatal truck car crashes, many of them similar to this crash. Something has to be done, and increasing the number of hours a truck driver can drive per day and per week, without a rest as proposed by the Federal Motor Carrier Administration will only lead to more fatal accidents like this one.
