Emergency vehicles ask for courtesy from local drivers

The holidays are well-known for drunk driving crackdowns. 

But people should also remember to slow down and if possible move over for authorized emergency vehicles that are stopped on the side of the road with their lights flashing.

That’s the simple request from one local wrecker driver and police who don’t want to see anyone hurt.

“It’s one of those laws that’s on the books, but people don’t know about ... I would like to raise the awareness level,” said Dale Wochnick, a wrecker driver with Oh’s Body Shop.

“What if that was your son, your daughter, your husband or your wife standing next to the road?” Wochnick asked. “Would you go whizzing by them at 70 miles per hour, three feet away?”

Accidents can happen.

A week ago Friday on U.S. 2, a Kalispell-area driver rear-ended a stopped fire truck that had its lights going, Wochnick said.

The driver “claimed to the hills she never saw the truck,” he said.

The other night, Wochnick was called to pull out a car that slid off Holt Stage Road. 

He put his reflective “wreck ahead” sign on the road, turned all his wrecker’s lights on and got everything ready to go at the accident scene. That’s when someone drove around the sign to try to get through, clipping a 3/8-inch cable stretched at an angle across the road.

“She moved the wrecker about three inches sideways,” Wochnick said, adding that, again, no one was hurt.

“There’s only so much we can do with signs, reflective clothing and lights,” Wochnick said of himself and others who work along the road.

What it takes sometimes is an awareness in drivers themselves to know to slow down, get over and be ready to stop. 

“It’s not like every accident I go to, it happens. But it happens frequently enough to where we really need to pay attention to this.”

Montana law requires motorists to slow down and proceed with caution when they encounter stopped emergency vehicles on the roadside flashing amber, blue, red or green lights.

They should merge into a far lane if they can safely do so. But if not, they must slow down: To at least 20 miles per hour under the speed limit on roads posted 50 or above.

Montana Highway Patrol Sgt. Steve Lavin said troopers also see drivers not slowing down or moving over as required.

“It seems like not a lot of people are really aware of [the law],” said Lavin, who also represents Kalispell in the Montana House of Representatives.

“It’s actually pretty strict,” Lavin said, adding he’d like to see police with adequate staffing work to warn drivers of the law and enforce it. “I’d like to see us get some billboards up or something.”

The law applies to public roads throughout Montana.

According to the Billings Gazette, city police there spent November actively enforcing the law, teaming up to warn drivers who failed to slow down or move over for officers on traffic stops.

Through three weeks of the selective traffic enforcement program, police made contact with 140 drivers and issued 59 warnings.

No such initiatives are planned locally.

“Our guys deal with that every day in town with high-traffic areas,” Kalispell Police Chief Roger Nasset said of drivers failing to slow down or move over.

Nasset said some of it boils down to the same distracted-driving issue Kalispell wrestled with as it pondered an ordinance to ban people from using handheld electronic communication devices while driving. (The ordinance did not pass.)

“I’ve been in a lot of states, and in Montana the traveling public is pretty good. But it seems to be getting more lax, with people not paying as much attention,” Nasset said. 

“A lot of that comes back to cellphones, distracted driving and things that occur other than keeping mind and eyes on the road.”

Fortunately, Kalispell hasn’t seen a major accident involving a stopped emergency vehicle for quite some time, Nasset said. But close calls are “innumerable and happen every day.”

“Until you get out there and have to deal with traffic rushing by, you don’t realize how dangerous it really is,” he said.

Reporter Tom Lotshaw may be reached at 758-4483 or by email at tlotshaw@dailyinterlake.com.