No one needs a crystal ball to make the following pronouncement: Today, tomorrow, or three weeks from now there will be a tragic motor vehicle collision that will be scantily announced in official circles. It will be pronounced as devastating. And there will be quotes from various politicians and officials explaining how deeply sorry they are that the tragedy took place. Investigating police will have closed the collision site for several hundred metres around, or sometimes for several kilometres, so that the peering eyes of journalists with long-zoom lens can only distinguish the markings of official vehicles, but very little or no useful images of the collision-involved vehicles. It will be announced that the tragedy is under investigation and it is too early to tell how it unfolded. And there will be quotes from local residents about how they do not understand how the tragedy occurred but they will explain their theories. And then there will be the many posts on social media, a very few will insightful and specific details, but by far, mostly a series of uninformed opinions that the collision could have been caused by Martians or unknown terrorists, or something similar. And then there will be silence until some future anniversary where some news articles will remind the public that the victims are sadly missed. Having spent well over 40-years of investigating and reconstructing the deaths of thousands of collision victims I do not need a crystal ball to know that this merry-go-round will continue spinning despite what words I may add to the process.
Just this past May 23rd the one-year anniversary of another traffic tragedy passed related to the deaths of five persons in a collision at the intersection of Thorndale Road and Cobble Hills Road east of Thorndale and less than 20 kilometres north-east of London, Ontario. Police who investigated the collision provided no useful information about it, not even the travel directions of the involved vehicles. The only useful information was that an SUV was struck by a truck and that truck collided with a second SUV. It was the initial impact that killed all five occupants of the first SUV.
In an article posted by Bryan Bicknell of CTV News in London, the comments of a couple of persons were posted will some thought-provoking content. One driver who reportedly drove through the intersection on a regular basis indicated he could not understand “…how this could have possibly happened”. And a resident who owns land at the intersection had the following comment:
“Well, the only thing out of the ordinary is that it has the hill over there, which is a little difficult seeing traffic coming this way,” he explained, referring to drivers coming from the south and checking to their east for any westbound traffic.“
In his article Bicknell referred to some signs near the intersection but made no reference to their relevance.
As a result of the lack of information I attended the collision site on June 1, 2025 and prepared an article (“Poor Reporting of 5-Fatal Collision North-East of London Ontario Has Consequences”) on my findings on June 10, 2025. This article is still available to be viewed on this Gorski Consulting website.
A few days after the collision occurred the official news media announced that local politicians would authorize a safety study of the intersection after the police investigation was completed. But why?
Surely a single motor vehicle collision does not spark a safety study at every intersection. Is it because five persons died in one vehicle? But if there was just a single driver then there might only have been one fatality. So was it just bad luck and nothing to do with the safety of the intersection? The motion for the study was unanimously approved. So did the councillors know something about the intersection that was not publicly revealed?
To this day no information has been made available about charges against the truck driver involved in this collision. Yet there were numerous racial slurs posted on the internet shortly after the collision occurred against that driver. Again, what information has passed under the radar that suddenly these comments have supposedly died down? Is it because the driver of the northbound “SUV” was governed by a stop sign and therefore deemed at fault? But there are many scenarios where such facts do not necessarily mean the driver is at fault. There could be many circumstances that exist that need to be considered. So were those circumstances considered? After a year has passed no one knows or, at least, no one officially knows.
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