the collision between the broncos team bus and a semi-truck at a highway intersection that killed 16 people and injured another 13 laid bare the shocking flimsiness of safety rules in the trucking industry, including a lack of thorough driver training .
in addition to the charges laid against the truck driver, jaskirat singh sidhu — for which he pleaded guilty, was sentenced to eight years in prison and now faces deportation — the calgary trucking company that employed sidhu also faced legal consequences for the april 2018 crash.
saskatchewan introduced mandatory truck driver training a year after the broncos tragedy.
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that should be frightening to anyone travelling on our roads. perhaps that was just an aberration? yet a three-day campaign in may conducted by the highway patrol and sgi yielded remarkably similar results .
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provincial public safety minister paul merriman said in a news release: “saskatchewan residents need to feel they can travel safely on our highways and removing unsafe commercial vehicles from our roads is one way we accomplish that.”
these crashes resulted in 295 injuries (about five per cent of the 5,392 total injured) and 22 fatalities — an alarming 24 per cent of the total 92 deaths.
sgi spokeswoman michaela solomon pointed out in an emailed reply that “ just because a collision occurred with a commercial vehicle doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t road safe, and these statistics also don’t represent whether the commercial vehicle involved in these collisions was at fault.”
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