Limitations Awareness

"But I think anyone that has driven in rural Saskatchewan for any length of period of time (sic) has probably had one of those crossings, where you've driven over an uncontrolled crossing and you've looked to your left or looked to your right, and seen a train a lot closer and you had no idea it was there.  It is not uncommon.  It's probably happened to every single person that's (sic) driven in Saskatchewan for any length of time."  Cpl. Rob King, Saskatchewan RCMP

How perfectly understanding, quite generously so.  The driver of the camper van hit by a train, a fifteen-year-old boy from Alberta, appears to be given a free pass.  Well, why not?  He's fifteen years old, after all.  It is being emphasized that this fifteen-year-old was in possession of a valid learner's permit.  His mother was with him in the van.  Monitoring and mentoring as must be done with someone of his age and with a learner's permit.

So the real question here is why would a 42-year-old woman feel confident in entrusting the safety and security of two young people, an 11-year-old girl from Chestermere, Alberta, and an 18-year-old young woman from Whitewood in Saskatchewan, to the learning driving skills of her fifteen-year-old son?  Let alone feeling what has turned out to be understatedly misplaced confidence in her son's capability, permitting him to drive while her own seven-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter were on board.

All four of those young people were killed in that unequal crash between the camper van and the train.  Paradoxically, the only survivors were the mother and son.  She who made the decision to allow her son to drive a vehicle with five other people in it, and he acceding to her confidence in him.  Two of the dead children are the driver's siblings, his younger brother and his sister.  The other two were not related to him, simply trusting passengers in the van he was driving.

How will this young man get through his life knowing that his unprepared driving skills led directly to the deaths of four people?  What kind of relationship henceforth will the young boy and his mother have in the wake of the deaths of half their family?  How will the mother whose assumptions were proven to be premature and erroneous ever live with herself?

"We've had lots of people get struck by trains or run into trains from a variety of ages, so to blame age or driver inexperience in this incident is premature.  I think we need to ... wait until the investigation is complete before we can even consider laying any type of blame or type of cause", explained Cpl. King so reasonably.

It was an uncontrolled crossing 150 kilometres east of Regina where the crash occurred.  The train tracks are parallel to the Trans-Canada Highway at that juncture, and the camper van happened to turn south off the highway when it was hit by the westbound Canadian Pacific train travelling about 80 kilometres an hour.

"[The train] T-boned the van kind of right broadside and it was completely destroyed."  Completely destroyed.  Investigators will be unable to determine whether there were any mechanical issues with the camper van.

Evidently the outstanding issues of driver capability and mentor decision-making has already been discounted.