207 resident rattled after crash

It was a Wednesday morning like any other. It was 6:50 a.m. and Phil Jacobs was behind the wheel of his dump truck, on his way to his job at the site of the future cultural centre, where he’s been contracted to haul away dirt and rock.

He began edging into Route 207, checking to make sure he had enough clearance to enter. He saw a driver about three driveways to his left, but figured he had more than enough room.

He was a third of the way onto the 207 when a Dodge Grand Caravan barrelled toward him, ramming his front fender.

“If he saw me, it was at the last second,” said Jacobs. “He never even slowed down, never. And there’s no way he could have missed me. It was already daylight.”

He saw the van sideways and smoking about 10 feet down the road. It was also at that moment he looked down and saw fuel running onto the road from a puncture in his tank.

“I had maybe 50, 60 gallons in my fuel tank. So that’s a lot of fuel, and it was coming out fast,” Jacobs said.

Worried the van might catch fire, he immediately backed up into his driveway. Then he called the Kahnawake Peacekeepers.

Jacobs was left unscathed, but the occupants of the van weren’t as lucky. At least three non-locals, including one woman and two men, were rushed to hospital with minor injuries.

Upward of eight to 10 people were inside the van at the time, Jacobs said.

Walking up the road, he was shocked when he realized he couldn’t spot any brake marks on the pavement.

“That guy never hit his brakes,” Jacobs said. “He had to have not been looking.”

Traffic was blocked in both directions in the area surrounding the Two 0 Seven steakhouse up until noon as first responders descended upon the area to deal with the aftermath.

One local and two outside ambulances rushed over, alongside numerous peacekeepers and firefighters with the Kahnawake Fire Brigade. Workers with Public Works and the Kahnawake Environment Protection Office (KEPO) also arrived to help clean up the roughly 200 litres of diesel fuel that spilled there.

The fire brigade immediately rushed to contain the fuel with sand, which had spread to a stream alongside the 207.

“We spread out absorbent to make sure that we kept as much as we could out of the ditch, and then we had to clean up a fair portion of the road,” said Wihse Stacey, assistant fire chief with brigade.

They later called in the crew with Public Works after running out of their firetruck’s stock of absorbent materials. Firefighters remained in the area until 9:15 a.m., at which point the cleanup was handed over to workers with KEPO.

While the spill was fairly significant, environment technician Kenneth Canadian he was relieved to see it contained to just the ditch.

“It was handled pretty much perfectly, if I had to be honest,” said Canadian, who oversaw the cleanup on behalf of KEPO. “We were lucky there was no rain this morning, and that there wasn’t a lot of water in the ditch and so it wasn’t flowing into the nearby wetlands.”

Absorbent booms were laid in the water to prevent that from happening. KEPO then called in an outside pump truck to suction up the diesel fuel in the water, which arrived by about 9:30 a.m. Contaminated soil and gravel from the area was also hauled away.

That crew remained there until about noon, Canadian said, blocking traffic in both directions up until they left.

Jacobs, 64, grew up on the 207 and still lives there to this day, so he’s just about seen it all. He wants a face-to-face meeting with Mohawk Council of Kahnawake (MCK) grand chief Cody Diabo, saying something needs to be done to limit outsiders accessing it.

“I drive for a living up and down this road. The stuff I see happening, they’re passing school buses with the lights on. They don’t care,” he said. “We got to put our foot down. We’ve got to do something.”

Council chief Jeremiah Johnson, who’s on the community safety file, said he was flooded with phone calls from community members about the crash. He agrees more needs to be done to limit non-locals, but said the resources required for that aren’t available right now.

“It’s a difficult thing to have to figure out, honestly, but in my personal opinion I think that a targeted closure at certain times would probably be best,” he said, adding additional peacekeepers would be needed to enforce that. “We are working diligently to solve this issue. It is a big issue for the table because it’s our community’s safety, and the safety of our community members is paramount here.”

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