East Sparta, OH — This past Monday morning, June 29, 2015 around 10:00 a.m., a worker with Thompson Electric was killed along SR 800 while he was repairing a traffic light. The worker was identified as Paul Vaughn, 46, and he died when his bucket truck was accidentally hit by a semi-truck driver.
The news said that Vaughn was working inside the bucket truck and was up in the air that morning, working on the traffic light, when 61-year old Vynce Gould came driving along in his semi-truck.
Apparently, Gould didn’t see Vaughn or his truck and accidentally crashed into both. This caused Vaugh to fall to the ground and he was badly injured.
After he was taken to a hospital, however, he died several hours later. Gould wasn’t injured, but the Ohio State Highway Patrol said they need to investigate to see if charges ought to be filed.
Map of the Accident
View from the Road
Commentary:
Something here doesn’t quite add up, because it seems like a worker in a large bucket truck ought to be extremely to someone driving along the road, especially a professionally-trained truck driver. Does anyone know more about what happened here? Did one of the traffic lights short out and confuse the truck driver? Or was he just not paying attention to the road? If that’s the case, then I think everyone linked to this accident deserves to know why.
I’ll point out one thing very quickly before I sign off here. I did a little checking on this truck driver and it turns out that someone with the same age, name, hometown, etc has a bit of a criminal record. Now, ordinarily, that kind of information might be pretty meaningless by itself, but consider the fact that safe roads start with safe drivers. Safe drivers (at least with commercial trucks) start with qualified drivers. If this trucker wasn’t qualified to be on the road that day, or if an investigation uncovers anything else amiss, then both he and his company are going to have some serious explaining to do.
The bottom line here is that this kind of accident is usually the result of some very blatant negligence, and that’s simply unacceptable for professional truck drivers on our roads. I’m not saying thisSide note: This victim was on the job when the accident happened, but this wouldn’t necessarily be considered a “work-related” accident. Without going into too many details, most states don’t allow for claims/lawsuits to be filed in a work-related accident, but if a third party is involved (i.e., a worker for a different company, an out-of-control driver, a faulty mechanism, etc), then there
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