A 43 year-old man from Lake Cowichan has been identified as the victim in Tuesday’s fatal crash in Cumberland involving a logging truck.
The truck had made a left turn from the Comox Valley Parkway to the on-ramp to the northbound lanes of Highway 19 when the trailer tipped over, spilling dozens of logs on top of a parked pick-up truck.
“At approximately 2:35 pm Tuesday our front-line members here in the Comox Valley responded to a report of a logging truck that had tipped over on the northbound on-ramp to highway 19 just off the Comox Valley Parkway,” said Const. Monika Terragni of the Comox Valley RCMP.
“When members arrived they found that a woman was trapped inside her truck underneath some logs and unfortunately a man was deceased under those same logs.”
A dog belonging to the victims was also rounded up at the scene and taken to the SPCA.
“So what it’s looking like at this time is the pick-up truck was pulled over to the shoulder of the road and at the time the logging truck lost its load the man who was deceased at the scene unfortunately was actually outside of the vehicle while the woman who was injured was inside the vehicle at the time that the logs fell,” added Terragni.
A second logging truck was brought in to the scene to carefully lift logs off the deceased man to make it safer for crews to recover him.
RCMP crash investigators were on the scene Tuesday collecting evidence to determine how the crash happened but there is no early indication today of what those answers might be.
A representative from the logging truck company involved visited the scene today, but declined to comment on what happened.
Dean Stoltz
