Comcast Crew Causes Massive, Dangerous Pile-Up on Icey Roads, Places Blame on Drivers

With the first snowfall of the winter season in the mid-west came a general sense of forgetfulness that you tend to have less grip when the roads are covered in snow and ice. This of course only worsened the already hazardous driving conditions and resulted in a spike in accident reports that is typical with this time of the year across the region. Most of us are careful drivers, and for the most part, we do look out for one another on the roads. However, a video circulating the web recently shows that a crew of Comcast workers in Indianapolis, Indiana didn’t seem to care all that much at all about their own safety, or that of the drivers. Watch Below: 

In the video posted to YouTube by user "Amish Hacker", a man, presumably using his cell phone captures video footage of the Comcast workers blocking off one lane of a two lane road to do some utility work. The location of the road block presents a danger to everyone, not mainly due to careless drivers, but because they are positioned just over the crest of a hill, which prevents oncoming drivers from seeing the truck and roadblock until the last second. As they are working, the video pans back to a gray Chevy Impala which is stuck in the snowy ditch. It seems that as they come over the hill, the drivers only have moments to react to the road block caused by the Comcast utility trucks, and at a 40mph speed limit, this can lead to detrimental consequences, as drivers seem to narrowly avoid hitting the trucks, or are left with no choice but to swerve and spin off the road all together, posing an additional risk of out of control cars possibly plowing into the nearby houses.

Eventually, the man capturing the entire series of events gets frustrated enough that he decides to put out his own cones in an effort to make drivers coming over the hill aware of the now much worse conditions just over the crest, thanks to the added danger of numerous wrecked cars. It’s also worth noting that through this entire scene the Comcast workers seem to show no sense of safety awareness or any empathy of the huge pile-up that has now built up around them.  

A perfect example of this comes in when the driver of a Volkswagen Passat sees the improvised road block put out by the cameraman, and is inching over the hill. As the driver of the Passat maneuvers through the pile up, a Black Chevrolet truck fails to see the cones and is seen coming over the hill at speed. The driver of the Chevrolet presumably only sees the Passat at the last second, and helplessly slams into the back of the Volkswagen, causing him to then swerve off the road, hitting a tree, which if not there, might have resulted in further collateral damage to the nearby home. At one point, one of the workers seems to even joke about the fact that people are continually wrecking out behind him because, to him, they are all driving way too fast for the conditions. However, they seem to forget that when blocking a road to do utility work, the Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) has rules and regulations in place that prevent these kinds of events from happening. I researched the rules for such conditions, and from what I can infer, the Comcast crew followed almost none of the rules.

According to the Comcast worker in the video, there should be 1 cone per 10mph speed limit. In this case, they’d put 5 out for a 40mph zone. That’s great – except they completely left out the proper distancing. Oh, and there should be way more signage for this type of work to let oncoming drivers know that there is work being done ahead. So all – in – all, this is a fail for the Comcast guys.

From the IDOT handbook, this type of work would fall under the category called “Short Term Stationary” – which is for jobs that last anywhere from 1-12 hours. The type of road this work falls under is what the manual calls a Lane Closure on a Divided Roadway or One-way street.  

If we look at the chart in the picture, you see the speed limit and the required distancing in correlation with the speed limit of that road. In this case, we’ll be looking at the 40mph requirements. It shows, that even before any cones appear, there are three signs that should warn drivers of road work being done up ahead. In total, there are three main signs and a “buffer” zone, adding up to a total of 1,370 feet of distance. Keep in mind, 1,050 feet of that comes before drivers even reach any cones. I may not be an expert at eyeballing distances, but I could almost guarantee you that there was nothing close to that amount of warning distance between where the Comcast trucks were parked and when drivers were made aware of the sudden lane closure.

Additionally, In the video, the Comcast driver, when confronted, stated that there should be one cone per 10 miles per hour. What he forgot, was that each one of those cones should have been spaced 40 feet apart. Again, I’m no expert, but in the video, the cones looked sort of just lazily placed behind the trucks, maybe about 10-15 feet apart – well below what is required in this instance.

So, what can we conclude here? Well, I’m all for unbiased writing when It comes to informing my readers, but in this case, I’m hoping that these workers were promptly fired. They exhibited ignorant, pompous behavior, a lack of regard for road safety, and an overall sense of “everyone here is wrong but us, so fuck off and let us do our job” – Sure, if your job is to cause road pile ups and endanger the lives of motorists, I’d say they were putting in one hell of an effort. Above all else, I think it’s important to note that we should always be alert, because there are jackasses like this that don’t care for your well-being when it comes to road safety. Luckily, from what I’ve understood about the situation, no one was seriously injured.