![]() He tumbled from the bike and was run over by a pickup truck. Lee, a 26-year-old oil field worker with a wife and two young sons, rounded a curve in the early-morning darkness, and the wheels of his Suzuki motorcycle slid off the asphalt edge. A state inspector warned that it was dangerous, but no one not his superiors, not the contractor listened. Yet when the contractors repaving Highway 51 west of Fort Worth discovered that they lacked sufficient equipment, they decided to pave only part of the roadway and finish the rest days later, leaving a sharp drop-off that ran for miles within the travel lane. Four years before, six people died in a succession of accidents in another Texas work zone, where contractors had failed to smooth out the edge of a newly paved lane. In Texas in 2002, seven people were killed when a car slipped off a sharp edge of roadway and onto the shoulder, causing the driver to overcorrect into the path of a minivan. Numerous studies have shown that the steeper the drop-off, the greater the danger. 15, 2005, the road-building industry and its government overseers were painfully aware of a deadly, though easily corrected, construction hazard: pavement-edge drop-offs.Īccidents involving dangerous drop-offs kill about 160 people and injure 11,000 each year. By the time Bryan Lee headed to work along Highway 51 in Texas on Sept.
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