Excessive speed seen as cause of 2002 woods accident

Imprudent speed was the official cause of the van accident that killed 14 foreign workers a year ago, although it may never be known how fast the driver actually was going.

A Maine State Police accident reconstruction team “could not find a speed for the van,” according to its report, but concluded the vehicle was traveling 28 mph when it went off John’s Bridge on Sept. 12, 2002. There also was no indication the driver was trying to brake.

The accident occurred around 8 a.m. that Thursday. Fifteen men from Honduras and Guatemala, all tree thinners, had been in the 15-passenger 2002 Dodge van for about 2 1/2 hours en route from Caribou to land owned by Pingree Associates and managed by Seven Islands Land Co. of Bangor.

It had rained the day before, and the private logging road the men were on in the Allagash Wilderness was wet and muddy. When the accident took place about 164 feet out on the 254-foot-long John’s Bridge, a one-lane wooden structure, the men were about five miles from their intended destination.

Fourteen of the 15 men drowned when the van went off the bridge and landed on its roof in 15 feet of water. One man was able to get out through a back window and swim to shore.

The day after the accident, at a press conference in Augusta, the Maine State Police reported that the driver, Juan Turcios-Matamoros of Honduras, was pushing between 60 and 70 mph when the van approached the bridge. The state police based the speed on a statement by the survivor, Edilberto Morales-Luis of Guatemala, who said the driver was traveling at around 70.

But a cultural or language barrier may have led to the 70 mph figure being reported as the speed. People in the Hispanic community believe Morales-Luis told police the van was traveling at 70 kilometers per hour, which is 42 mph. He might have been misunderstood to say 70 mph.

“Was it 50 [miles per hour]? Maybe,” said state police Sgt. Rick McAlister, supervisor of the accident reconstruction team. “Was it 70? I seriously doubt it. All we can say conclusively is when they went off that bridge, they were going 28 miles per hour.”

The week before the accident, the driver’s supervisor, Keith Hansen of Evergreen Forestry Services, had told him to keep his speed down when traveling the logging roads, according to U.S. Department of Labor documents. And the morning of the accident, passengers, including the survivor, asked Turcios-Matamoros to drive more slowly.

Just before the accident occurred, the driver took a sharp left turn in the road and the bridge was in front of him. Turcios-Matamoros did not position the vehicle on the bridge properly, according to McAlister and the accident reconstruction team.

John’s Bridge has two rows of 2 1/2-inch-thick planks running the length of the bridge for vehicle tires to travel on. The planking is supported from underneath by crossbeams spaced about two inches apart. The beams are exposed on either side of the rows of planks.

Positioned over the crossbeams on the outside edges of the bridge are steel I-beams that lie on their sides.

The beams are 8 inches tall with much of their centers filled with pressure-treated wood. However, a slight ridge on either side of the beams remains, creating a channel that runs the length of the bridge.

Steel bolts, with their heads sticking just above the wood inside the channel, secure the beams, according to Stephen McCausland, spokesman for the Maine State Police.

The metal curb is not intended to act as a guardrail, he said.

When the driver approached the bridge after making a sharp left turn in the road, the passenger-side tires drove on top of the I-beam on the right side and caught inside the channel. The tires were shredded and the rims flattened 11 of the steel bolt heads as the van moved forward. The driver’s side wheels traveled on the crossbeams between the two rows of planks.McAlister said the driver was not trying to brake the van, but was attempting to get the wheels off the I-beam and back onto the travel portion of the bridge.

“I believe that if the operator had not tried to bring his right [passenger] side tires onto the right side planking, he would have easily crossed the bridge, even though he was not centered properly,” wrote state police Trooper Corey A. Hafford, a member of the accident reconstruction team. As the driver tried to take corrective action, the vehicle jerked, and the passenger-side wheels went off the wrong side of the I-beam. The metal undercarriage of the van skidded across the steel I-beam. The van then flipped and fell 20 feet into the water below, settling on its roof in 15 feet of water.

Late in the afternoon, hours after the accident happened, the van was pulled from the water with the men still inside. Police loaded the upside-down vehicle onto a flatbed tractor-trailer logging truck and placed a tarp over it. The truck was driven about 10 miles from the accident site to the nearest garage “where the initial observation occurred by the Medical Examiner’s Office,” McCausland said.

After that, the truck, with a police escort, was driven over miles of bumpy dirt roads to Interstate 95 en route to Augusta. The entire trip took about five hours. The bodies were taken out of the vehicle the next morning.

During a recent interview, Sherry Izaguirre of Presque Isle, widow of one of the men who died, said she was disgusted the bodies weren’t taken out of the van before the trip to Augusta.

“It was morbid,” she said. “Would we have done that to one of our own?”

McCausland said no disrespect was intended by keeping the men’s bodies in the van. He said the remoteness of the area and the rough terrain of the road made it next to impossible to get hearses there to pick up the bodies. Plus, he said, the state police and the Medical Examiner’s Office did not have the necessary equipment to preserve the accident scene inside the van and conduct an accurate inventory of the men’s bodies and their belongings.

“The decision was to leave things as they were,” said McCausland, who noted the same decision is made when people die in car fires or in remote areas. “That is done quite often in Maine when there are extraordinary [circumstances].”