On July 10, Franklin County Sheriff’s deputy Aaron Turcotte was called to Bailey Hill Road in Farmington, where a northbound pickup truck had just gone off the roadway, struck a ditch and gone airborne.
It came to rest with the nose of the truck in a second ditch. The two men inside, David Peaslee and Doug Chick of Strong, were seriously injured.
Turcotte, a crash reconstruction specialist, went to work, observing all the evidence available to him. Skid marks started in the southbound lane, crossed back over into the north lane, then went off the road and across a driveway. A clear path of turned up dirt marked where the truck went through the first ditch and began to sideslip. A patch of debris was left behind when it went airborne as it struck the culvert.
And then there was vehicle damage and the final resting place of the truck.
The skies were clear with temperatures in the mid-80s, the road was dry and the sun would have been behind the truck, all of which ruled out road and weather conditions as factors in the crash.
Because speed and alcohol may have been factors, and this is still an open case that will be prosecuted, Turcotte’s final findings aren’t available until a trial.
“In this type of collision, I start where the vehicle came to rest and measure back to where the truck began to lose control,” Turcotte said.
He started by picking a reference point, a CMP pole, from which he ran a base line along the southbound shoulder of the road to give him “X” and “Y” coordinates of each segment of the crash.
He measured the distance from the driver’s side front tire back to where the Chevrolet went airborne to find the shortest distance traveled in that segment of the crash. Judging from tire marks, the driver’s side tire was the first to go airborne and the first to touch down. The position of the truck – lower when it landed then when it went airborne – tells Turcotte which airborne formula to use to calculate the speed for this segment of the crash.
Turcotte used string to measure the distance the truck traveled along the ditch before it went airborne. The deep tracks in the dirt told him the drag factor to use, and he plugged that information into a minimum speed formula.
“We always give the driver the benefit of the doubt, which is why we calculate the minimum speed,” Turcotte said.
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