There doesn’t seem to be any way around road closures, OPP superintendents Mike Maville and Todd Proulx told Northern Ontario’s municipal leaders this week.
The two police officers spoke to the topic during the Federation of Northern Ontario Municipalities convention at the Holiday Inn and Conference Centre in Sudbury on Wednesday.
While recognizing the inconvenience multi-hour closures can have — in some cases, upwards of five days in the event of extreme weather events — they said there’s not much they can do.
The rationale for closing highways during extreme weather events is fairly straightforward, Maville said, adding that it’s a safety hazard.
Drawing from an experience he had on a highway near Wawa, Maville described a white-out situation where he couldn’t see the road in front of him.
When it comes to collisions, he said the OPP owe it to motorists and their families to undertake a full investigation, which can take hours.
“If someone has lost a loved one because of something like a homicide or some kind of nefarious activity, you’d expect police to investigate that fully,” he said, adding that the same applies to motor vehicle incidents.
Disregarding the notion of motor vehicle “accidents,” he said, “In every collision, someone is at fault. Even if it’s just a minor fender-bender, there’s a reason that happened, and we owe it to the family, we owe it to everybody involved to do a proper and thorough investigation.”
The OPP have six reconstructionists in the northeast region, who first have to travel to the motor vehicle incident scene and then undertake a thorough examination which can take hours.
Any collision classified as a “Benchmark Collision” may require police to close a highway in order to preserve evidence for an investigation. These include “anything with a serious personal injury that could be life-altering,” Maville said, and don’t include such things as minor fender-benders.
However, when a police officer or school bus is involved, an investigation is required regardless of the collision’s seriousness — a “relatively broad” scope of incidents, he added.
“We don’t want to close a highway, ever,” Maville said. “We understand these transportation arteries are very important ... but if it’s closed, it’s closed for a reason.”
The inconvenience of highway closures wasn’t lost on the two presenters, with Maville noting that if Highway 144 is closed between Sudbury and Gogama, motorists’ only real options are to wait for the highway to clear or head back to where they came from.
In the OPP northeast region, they superintendents noted there have been eight fatal motor vehicle incidents on roads so far this year, which compares to 12 by this time last year.
However, there have been slightly more personal injuries reported on roads, with 166 year-to-date compared to 157 reported by this time in 2023.
Tyler Clarke covers city hall and political affairs for Sudbury.com.
