Ok, Opinion 250, just wondering if it was really necessary to show the cars involved, very likely before many family and friends could be notified?

My sincerest condolences to those family and friends. Tragic.

These pictures were on Global noon news so Op250 is a couple hours behind.

In a town as small as PG the names were prob known quite soon after the accident.

So terrible. My heart goes out to the families.

What a terrible tragedy :-(
My heart goes out to all the families involved.

These tragic scenes are happening all to often on our local highways and most of the time its the terrible road maintenance.

Proactive road maintenance would see the radar, and be following the weather, and know that that we had precipitation coming within 5-degrees of freezing... this was entirely predictable. This is what HMC in the Quesnel area does very well.

The salt trucks should have been on the scene before the accident happened and the salt would have been in a brine by then that would have kept the black ice and slush from forming in the first place.

100% blame this on the privatization of road maintenance and their getting away with not putting down the salt until they absolutely have to, or are ordered to do so by the RCMP. This type of accident is about money saved by the contractors... and not about the actual drivers involved or their ability, or their sobriety, or their speed... sadly we can count on the opportunist to claim otherwise though when they bring out their stats on road fatalities to justify the police state.

When you have slush covering black ice and small cars with no weight... this is what happens. I see it all the time and all to often. Last week not a day went by when we didn't have these conditions, and there were cars and trucks in the ditch every time.

The two most horrendous stretches of road maintenance in Northern BC are PG to Bednesti, and PG to Huble Homestead. Both sections of road covered by YRB PG.

Vanderhoof to Bednesti is also YRB, but from Vanderhoof office, and it is always every time far better maintained than the PG side... easily noticeable, and yet its the same highway with the same weather. Ditto for north of town... YRB Bear Lake clearly does a better job than the PG side.

The solution short of firing the PG YRB management team... is to have allowance for overlapping of services where if the PG side does not have the resources available, or the management of those resources, then they can be shifted in from neighboring area's of responsibility. Most every snow storm is limited in size, and in a hundred kilometer stretch will either take you in or out of the storm... hence the need for shifting resources where they are required.

PG north resources always seem to shift to the west or south from the PG branch... so why not from the Bear Lake branch to cover, or similar from Hixon north, or Vanderhoof east? The answer is privatized silo's that operate on the dollar and not on the safety of our highways. People die and people cry, but politicians continue to lie. This is what highway privatization is all about after all.

Considering our local MLA is the Highway Minister you would think she would be on this...are we at a dozen dead yet this month in PG from poor road maintenance on our highways... must be nice showing up for photo ops of dollars spent down south though.

"These tragic scenes are happening all to often on our local highways and most of the time its the terrible road maintenance."

Don't even know what caused this motor vehicle incident, yet people want to blame maintenance of the highway.
Some day they may tell us what happened, but what the blazes has all this got to do with a police state? Well,that's your opinion I guess, for what it's worth.

I agree with the previous comments regarding the piss poor road maintanence on the highway from P.G to Bednesti. As someone that travels from PG to Vanderhoof daily, it always amazes me the difference on the Vanderhoof side. Hats off to YRB Vhoof!!

Eagleone. you have the answers for the problem obviously.
Go public!!!

Eagles description of the poor maintenance is bang on. PG to Bednesti is a well known health hazard in the winter. Bednesti to Vanderhoof is great, no issues. YRB in Vanderhoof is a different company than the one here in PG.

This particular stretch of the highway is a longtime joke amongst truckers and others that use it on a daily basis.

YRB and the gov't are well aware of the issue but refuse to deal with it.

Its funny how truckers always have all the answers - from road maintenance to world economy...if the politicians would just listen to Lad1 the world would be at peace.

I agree with eagleone. One just has to take a close look at the picture.

I recently had to drive back from Williams Lake. The day began with early morning snow in WL, just below freezing. It was snowing all the way until I reached PG at the old Art Knapp's store.

The worst snowing was to the north of Quesnel. The entire stretch of highway between Williams Lake to Quesnel was plowed and sanded. Not just the hills, even the flat sections.

North of Quesnel it switched to only sloped sections being sanded.

In addition to the vast difference in highway maintenance during snowing conditions I noticed that the divided portion around the new weigh scale seemed not to be sanded or plowed at all. In addition, with the snow, one could not see which way the roads were going. There were poles from which signs/signals will eventually hang (I assume) but they were not there. As a result, anyone who had not been there before when the weather was clearer would have known to keep right unless they had to get to the scale. The car in front of me slowed down, hesitated and finally veered to the left to go to the scales. Unless the driver was working there, he/she likely made the wrong decision.

Needless to say, I felt less safe driving between Quesnel and PG than driving between WL and Quesnel.

And yes, I was driving slower than the posted speeds and to the conditions as I saw them.