Missouri State Highway Patrol warns drivers to yield
Missouri State Highway Patrol warns drivers of the dangers of not yielding to stopped emergency vehicles on the side of the highway or street.
A couple of days ago the Missouri State Highway Patrol captured on their dash cam, a near death experience for a state trooper and the owner of the vehicle he stopped.
A Missouri State Highway Patrol car stopped a vehicle on highway 13 in Missouri, and within seconds – a moment that him and the driver of the BMW wouldn’t forget.
A trailer truck driver side swiped the State Trooper vehicle and the vehicle that was stopped to the shoulder. Nearly costing the life of the both the state trooper and the car owner.
Angel Lewis, the car owner, ran out immediately after the incident to check on the state trooper, “He was asking me if I was okay even before he was saying if he was fine. He’s like, ‘Did your car get hit… are you ok?’ I’m like, ‘We’re fine, are you okay?’ “
Sgt. Jason Pace says that, “All three could have been killed, not just the trooper, but the violator and the tractor trailer violator.”
Missouri does have a law that helps protect the safety of emergency stopped vehicles and MO-DOT. The Move Over Law advises drivers to, proceed with caution, yield the right-of-way, make a lane change- if it’s safe and possible, and reduce the speed of your vehicle.
Not only do drivers need to slow down with emergency vehicles parked on the side of the highway or street, but in construction zones. The City of Columbia has a lot of construction going on and Trooper Jacob Vislay says that he does catch a lot of drivers speeding thru those areas. “There are going to be a lot of workers in that area, so we just need to make sure that we give them some extra coverage and extra protection.”
In Mid- Missouri, there were 81 fatalities in 2015 that were traffic related, which means some kind of speeding or driver distraction were involved. 15 of those fatalities were in Boone County, 14 were in Callaway County, 10 in Camden County, 9 in Miller County, and 9 in Montgomery County.
