2 injured in head-on crash near same Whatcom intersection school bus was hit Tuesday
Two people were injured in a head-on crash Wednesday near the same intersection where a small school bus from the Nooksack Valley School District was T-boned less than a day earlier.
The two drivers were transported to St. Joseph’s hospital in Bellingham — one in critical condition, one in serious — Washington State Patrol Trooper Heather Axtman told The Bellingham Herald. The state patrol did not have full names, ages or genders for the drivers.
The crash, which involved a smaller box truck and a Ford F-150 pickup, occurred shortly before 7:30 a.m. Feb. 26 near Everson Goshen Road and Central Road, Axtman said. The crash fully blocked Everson Goshen Road for approximately an hour and sent the F-150 into a ditch about 10 feet off the roadway.
The driver of the box truck was trapped in the vehicle until they could be removed and taken to the hospital, Axtman said.
A complete report on Wednesday’s accident was not yet available, Axtman said, and the crash is under investigation, though a collision technician was not called to the scene.
Just more than 15 hours earlier, at 4:36 p.m. Tuesday, a school bus carrying seven students northbound on Everson Goshen Road was struck by a van that apparently ran a stop sign on Central Road, Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office Traffic Sgt. Kevin Moyes told The Bellingham Herald.
The students were all wearing seat belts and there were no reports of any serious injuries, Moyes said.
Vehicles heading east and west on Central Road must stop at the intersection, while traffic heading north and south on Everson Goshen Road has a speed limit of 50 mph and does not have a stop sign.
While Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s crashes are the first of the year near the intersection, according to the Washington State Department of Transportation’s Crash Portal, they are not the first in the area.
The Crash Portal shows there were two crashes at the intersection in 2019, though neither had any apparent injuries. A year earlier in 2018, there were also two crashes at the intersection, and one them possibly involved injury, WSDOT reported.
From 2010-19 the intersection has averaged about two crashes per year, half of which involved an injury, the WSDOT data showed.
