Nominee For World's Most Moronic Snow Plow Operator

Video still showing a clueless snow plow driver in Ohio 
blithely spraying chunks of ice and slush into 
the opposite lane of the Ohio Turnpike, damaging 50
cars and injuring 12 people. 

 I live on what is officially a Vermont State Highway, (Route 36) so trucks from the Vermont Agency of Transportation plow snow and spread salt on the road that runs in front of my house. 

I'm always impressed by how professionally and promptly clear the roads at all hours of the day. 

I'm also pretty sure highway crews in other states are just as good at their jobs.

But there's bad apples everywhere. Which takes us to the Ohio Turnpike in Erie County, Ohio. There, a clueless plow truck driver and moron decided to cause some havoc.

The stuff he was clearing from the westbound lanes of the Ohio Turnpike consisted of heavy slush and chunks of ice.  The driver could have arranged the plow to push the slush off the right side of the highway, or at least go slow enough so the ice wouldn't go all over the place if he wanted to clear it in the opposite direction.

Instead, the oblivious idiot went fast enough to propel the slush and ice over a median barrier and onto traffic in the eastbound lanes of the Turnpike. For two whole miles at least.  

He did this without seeming to notice he was wrecking car after car and causing a number of accidents. By the time Moron Plow Driver was done, at least 50 cars were damaged and 12 people had injuries. Luckily, none of the injuries were life threatening.

Which is a miracle. Video of the incident showed numerous tractor trailers on the highway, which could have lost control during the incident and flattened smaller cars.

News video, which includes a video of the slush and ice being dumped on the highway and smashing into cars and causing crashes, is at the bottom of this post. 

Needless to say, the motorist affected are wicked pissed. People were stranded without cars.  Owners of damaged cars were told to file a police repot and the the Ohio Turnpike and Infrastructure Commission would deal with insurance claims.

But other than that, everybody was on their own. One woman from Youngstown with a damage car was just dumped at a local McDonald's and told to figure out on her own how to get home. 

The Commission put the Moron Plow Driver on administrative leave pending an investigation. They also did some drug and alcohol checks on the guy.

The Ohio Turnpike and Infrastructure Commission statement, included in this news report, is a triumph of vacuous PR damage control attempts, but it's so florid that whoever wrote it was really desperate.

They smell the lawsuits coming.

I don't mean to disparage that whole commission, as I'm sure most of them are cool and know what they're doing. But yikes!

By the way, the vast majority of crashes involving snow plows are not the fault of the snow plow drivers.  Seems like other motorists can't seem to avoid smashing into what we would think are highly visible, big trucks with flashing lights. But what to I know?   

Despite my high confidence in Vermont snow plow drivers, I'm going to be more than a bit careful when I see the plow's wave of snow coming my way. 

Here's the news video that includes the images of the plow spray that snow and slush. The video report says 40 cars were damaged but that was later updated to 50 or so.   Either click on this hyperlink, or view below: