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| Gunn's Mazda after accident on TX 105 East |
She had recently reunited with her birth son, Jerry Gunn, 19, who had years before been adopted. The night of Sept. 3, 2011, Majors lost the son she had just found and become close to, and she nearly lost three other family members.
The family was celebrating the upcoming wedding of Major’s daughter. Her husband, daughter and sister-in-law were riding in a Mazda two-door sedan that Gunn was driving. They were on their way to Conroe to pick up Jackie Majors for dinner.
Krystal Partridge, Majors’ daughter, barely remembers the crash. She does recall they had pulled out of a gas station onto Texas 105 East, behind an 18-wheeler going about 35 mph. Gunn wanted to pass the truck, she said, because the speed limit is 55 mph.
Gunn veered over to the other lane and sped up to pass, but the truck began picking up speed and may not have noticed the car was trying to pass, Partridge said.
A car was approaching in the distance, and Gunn tried to slow down to get back over, but the truck was in his way, she said.
Their car hit the oncoming Toyota head-on.
Majors’ husband had severe head trauma, four broken bones in his back, three broken ribs and a sliced speen. He was on life support for three days.
Her sister-in-law sliced her face, broke her jaw, and broke nearly a dozen bones in both her hands.
Partridge broke four bones in her back, her left arm and right leg. She also broke both shinbones, which pierced through the skin, causing her to lose so much blood she had to be rushed to Conroe Regional Medical Center so she could be stabilized enough for transport to Memorial Hermann Hospital-Texas Medical Center in Houston.
Gunn died at the scene.
Her guilt over the accident still haunts Majors, she said, because the wreck happened as her family was on their way to pick her up. She doesn’t want to think about losing one of her children and nearly losing another in the same wreck.
What she does want, she said, is for Texas 105 East to be widened so vehicles can safely pass each other instead of being forced into dangerous situations.
“Something really needs to be done about that road,” she said, “because I don’t want anyone else to go through what I did.”
Rising population, failing roads
While fatal wrecks caused by drunk driving are on the decline here because of crackdowns such as no refusal programs, Montgomery County’s roads are the biggest reason the county is still the deadliest per capita in Texas, officials say.
Fatal crashes in Montgomery County have decreased slightly over the last five years, but its rapidly growing population has helped it retain its title of the deadliest county in Texas. And Texas 105 is Montgomery County’s deadliest road, topping the list for the highest reported location of fatal crashes in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2011, and placing second in 2010 and third in 2006.
Interstate 45, Texas 242 and FM 1314 also were consistently among the top fatal crash sites since 2006.
The state’s 11th-largest county, Montgomery County’s fatality rate has decreased slightly as its population has gone up, with an average of 1.8 fatalities per 10,000 people in 2006. That year, there were 74 fatalities, and the population was 392,500, according to Texas Department of Transportation data.
In 2010, the rate was 1.5 deaths per 10,000 people, but the county’s population was up to slightly more than 455,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
The county’s many rural roads can’t handle the traffic that comes with a fast-growing population, and they can’t be expanded quickly enough to keep up, Department of Public Safety Trooper Erik Burse said.
“We’re a rural area that’s growing and we’re competing with all these big cities,” Burse said.
Montgomery County is “still a dangerous county to drive in,” said Assistant District Attorney Warren Diepraam, chief of the Vehicular Crimes Division for the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office. “We’re basically a rural county, with a rapidly growing population.
In 2010, rural areas accounted for 56 percent of fatal crash sites in Texas. The two biggest factors are speed and alcohol.
Road conditions, construction plans
The state has many two-lane roads with high speed limits and low ditches near them, and the funds allocated to improve the state’s roads are “not enough,” said Richard Brown, area engineer for the Texas Department of Transportation.
There has been increased work done on Texas 105 East in recent years, he said, with the addition of left-turn lanes, signals and “rumble strips” with $250,000 in changes made in 2011, Brown said.
More money is planned for continued progress on the state highway, with a projected $7 million for adding alternating passing lanes and more left- and right-turn lanes to the 19-mile stretch, he said.
TxDOT has received 13 complaints related to Texas 105 since November 2010, according to its tracking system. Of those, eight related to the need for more traffic light signals, stop signs, additional lanes and turn lanes.
Complete expansion of Texas 105 East from two to four lanes is a project that may be completed in the next decade. The cost could be more than $150 million because of the expense to buy property rights of way near the road, said Stuart Corder, TxDOT director of transportation operations.
Where things get tricky is in finding money, because there’s only so much that can pay for improvements and new construction, Corder said.
“We do small things with time we have and the money we have,” he said. “Texas is very fast growing, especially the areas around Houston, and so we’re working as hard as we can with the money we have.”
Monitoring crashes and responding to citizen concerns can help TxDOT improve what it can, he said.
Cut and Shoot Mayor J.D. Roberts has made safety on Texas 105 East a priority over the past 12 years he’s served on the City Council and as mayor. Roberts joined the Montgomery County Mobility Committee eight years ago with the mission to improve the highway that runs directly through Cut and Shoot.
The committee is an informational outlet for city and school officials to meet and discuss roadway safety concerns and suggest solutions to TxDOT. Many of those changes have focused on Texas 105 East for more than a decade, Roberts said.
Improvements to the road are “a complicated issue,” Roberts said. “We have a dangerous situation, as well as our traffic.”
Traffic is often at a standstill from 4-6 p.m. most days, and the roadway is still dangerous even with the added signals and turn lanes, he said. Before the turn lanes were added, it was “nearly impossible” to turn because of the high volume of traffic.
County roads receive $1 million to $1.5 million in maintenance from the $4 million allotted annually to the budgets of each of Montgomery County’s four commissioners. With about 500 miles of roads north of Texas 105 in Precinct 1, Commissioner Mike Meador said there’s not enough money for road construction.
Money allotted for roads goes to repaving and repairing, along with mowing and litter maintenance services. Commissioners try to stay on top of rough road conditions in their precincts and make repairs when possible.
The opportunity for more money to fund road improvements looks bleak. County voters rejected a $200 million road bond in November, and Meador said another road bond is “not likely” in coming years.
“Basically, our roads in Precinct 1 and in Montgomery County are safe,” he said. “I think they’re all pretty safe if you drive the speed limit.”
Funding improvements to existing roads statewide is an ongoing problem, said state Sen. Robert Nichols, R-Jacksonville, whose District 3 includes North and East Montgomery County. During his eight-year tenure on the Texas Transportation Commission that ended in 2005, he “paid a lot of attention to safety.”
Back then, about 60 percent of vehicle fatalities in the state were on two-lane rural roads.
“There’s a lot of traffic on those two-lane rural roads,” he said. “They’re dangerous.”
In addition to the Legislature using money from the state’s transportation fund for other projects, the main reason for diminished funding, Nichols said, is the decreasing amount generated by the fuel tax. With cars achieving greater fuel efficiency every year, Nichols said, there’s barely enough money to continue road maintenance.
He proposed a bill during the last session for a constitutional amendment that would use the vehicle sales tax to finance work on roads and bridges. The bill didn’t pass, but Nichols said he plans to bring it before the Legislature again.
About $2.8 billion is generated annually in Texas from vehicle sales tax. That funding goes into the state’s general budget, Nichols said, so allotting a portion to transportation is a start.
“I think the public always likes fees to go to the service,” he said. “Why not let those fees go to infrastructure? Without cars, we wouldn’t have roadways. Everybody knows that we have to solve this problem.”
The healing continues
Majors and her family continue to heal physically and emotionally from the devastating wreck. Her husband walks with a limp, and her sister-in-law may need rods in her hands to help them completely heal.
Krystal Partridge postponed her wedding for a few weeks but after six surgeries, she married her Marine husband before he deployed to Afghanistan, going down the aisle in a wheelchair
Partridge began physical therapy Wednesday, another step in her long healing process.
As for Majors, her anger over the crash has been “placed on hold,” she said, to oversee the healing of her three family members who survived.
She relives the accident and the loss of her son every day, she said.
“They all should have been dead. I should have lost everyone in that car accident,” she said. “I don’t ever want to forget, because then he disappears.
“I don’t want his death to be in vain.”
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source: The Courier of Montgomery County (Waugh, 1/28)
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