ANTIGONISH, N.S. — On Monday morning, their pagers went off again for a crash at the Beech Hill intersection of Highway 4.
As they rushed out the doors of their homes, the members of the Antigonish County Volunteer Fire Department knew it would be bad.
A tractor trailer had collided with a car.
The driver of the car, a 41-year-old Toronto man, was pronounced dead at the scene and an RCMP reconstructionist spent the morning figuring out what happened.
RCMP said that at 7:18 a.m., a black car was travelling north on Beech Hill Road, stopped at the stop sign, then pulled out onto Highway 4 in front of an eastbound logging truck.
"The logging truck struck the black car, then struck a blue car that had been waiting to turn left at the same intersection," RCMP said in a news release. The drivers of the truck and blue car weren't injured but the driver of the black car died at the scene.
Though it was the first fatality at the intersection, it was far from the first crash.
When the newly twinned section of Highway 104 opened in 2016 it was supposed to result in fewer accidents by circling around behind the Town of Antigonish.
But on the first day the highway opened the department got three calls for accidents at the intersection that sees the Beech Hill Road cross the old Trunk 4 highway.
In 2017, 19 of the department’s 91 calls were to that one intersection.
“It takes a toll on the membership,” said chief Allan Kennedy after his department returned from the extrication.
Cautioning that they aren’t highway engineers, Kennedy and deputy chief Jon DeWolfe both said Monday that something needs to be done.
And something, as it turns out, is going to be done.
Though it will be too late for Monday's victim.
The Department of Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal followed through on an Antigonish County council request for a traffic study to be done on the intersection.
Department spokesman Peter McLaughlin confirmed Monday studies of the intersection and the entire length of Trunk 4 have been completed and they intend to begin design work this spring on modifications.
The design will include a lane reduction and “other intersection improvements“ with construction to be scheduled in the 2021-22 capital plan.
“That’s good to hear,” said County Warden Owen McCarron upon hearing the department’s plans.
For Kennedy and his volunteers, the work can’t come soon enough.
