The South-West Region of the Ontario Provincial Police along with the London City Police are the two worst distributors of collision information in the Province of Ontario. So it is not surprising that, once again, basic information has not been provided about a fatal collision that occurred on Hwy 401 in the early hours of December 7, 2025 near Iona Road.
The one improvement is that an actual photo of the collision site was made available and this is shown above. However, look at the views of the two involved vehicles. Can anyone see anything useful from this view that could provide a basic indication as to how the collision occurred? The photo is taken from a considerable distance and the two vehicles are mostly hidden by tall weeds. Also the left half of the photo shows several police vehicles as if this is what would be relevant to anyone wanting some basic information. It is as if the photographer purposely arranged this view to show nothing.
But there is something curious in the photo at the high-tension cable barrier at the median. We have highlighted the area with an orange circle. There appears to be a gap in the cable barrier. Ordinarily such barriers extend for a very long distance without gaps for a very good reason – so the barrier maintains its tension and strength. Of course there are areas where a barrier terminates by design and another section immediately follows. And, because the police photographer took their photo from a substantial distance from this gap it is not possible to know whether this was a designed gap or something where a vehicle struck the barrier and created the gap. And police have not said anything about any involvement of a median barrier.
Since police provided very little information about the location of the collision site, it could be anywhere between Currie Road and Union Road, a distance of about 15 kilometres. One news media outlet indicated that the collision site was “…at Iona Road in Dutton”. But Iona Road is nowhere near Dutton. Or at least Iona Road is about 8 kilometres east of Currie Road, which is the crossroad that one would take into Dutton. So all of this is “very helpful” to all.
We conducted some research by looking at some of the features of the police photo and from this we suspect that the collision site may be located about 2.3 kilometres west of Iona Road. But given that poor information, this analysis is not 100% certain. But if our analysis is correct, we used Googlemaps to drive along the eastbound lanes of Hwy 401 in this area and we could not detect a designed separation in the high-tension median barrier. So are the Googlemaps images too old and a new separation in the barrier was constructed? Not very likely. So why does this separation appear to exist in the median barrier in the police photo?
The safety concerns about the median of Hwy 401 in this area have existed for decades. And any police official who had any policing experience in the area would be aware of the many concerns expressed by persons about the lack of a concrete median barrier. Many persons expressed concerns when the new, high-tension, cable barrier was installed. And many persons wanted to know when, and how, a collision occurred so that they could evaluate the functioning of that barrier. So when police have not provided, even the most basic information about this latest collision, it lays doubt about their good/honest intentions.
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