Collisions on Red Hill Valley Parkway could have been avoided: report

The multi-million dollar report commissioned by the City of Hamilton on the Red Hill Valley Parkway was released Wednesday, with a sharp focus on the misconduct and carelessness of a former top city official.

The inquiry was requested in 2019 to examine rising concerns about an abnormally high number of accidents on the highway, in addition to concerns that an official at city hall failed to share a report about issues related to the road.

In the years since the Red Hill Valley Parkway first opened in 2007, it became widely known that the pavement would become particularly slippery when wet.

There were numerous collisions over the years, some of them fatal.

A number of these occurred while a report was being buried at city hall that contained vital information on the friction levels of the road and how slippery the pavement was for vehicles as the record of collisions mounted.

One of those fatal collisions claimed the lives of Olivia Smosarski and Jordyn Hastings in 2015. Jordyn’s stepmother Leony followed the news of the Red Hill inquiry closely.

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“What really leaps out for me is how one person at the City of Hamilton can hold so much power to bury a public safety report when it’s been paid for with taxpayers dollars and burial would put so many lives at risk.” she said.

The inquiry led to Superior Court judge Herman Wilton-Siegel concluding that “friction levels on the RHVP were generally below or well below” the standard they were measured against and that the “relatively low Red Hill Valley Parkway (RHVP) friction levels were a likely contributor to collisions.”

Wilton-Siegal also dealt with questions about Hamilton’s former Director of Enginering Services Gary Moore, who did not share a 2014 report on the friction levels done by a group called Tradewind.

The judge said “Moore’s failure to provide the Tradewind Report to the (city’s) Traffic group for the purposes of its traffic safety mandate was misconduct.”

Wilton-Siegel goes on, saying it’s fair to “assume that the failure to disclose the Tradewind Report contributed to accidents and injuries on the RHVP.”

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Leony strongly believes Jordyn could have still been alive if circumstances surrounding the original report conducted just a year prior to Jordyn’s death had been shared and steps had been taken to resolve the issues back then.

“It’s devastating. it put a lot of lives at risk and the report is clear that had the CIMA and trade winds reports had been made public that drivers would have had the chance at navigating a challenging road successfully,” said Leony.

“Jordyn was a relatively new driver and we wouldn’t have allowed her to drive on the red if we’d known it wasn’t safe, especially in wet conditions. I really believe it would have made a difference had those reports been released.”

Mayor Andrea Horwath issued a statement following the release of the report saying that people’s “trust in the city was profoundly shaken” by the handling of the Parkway and “action will begin quickly to address (the inquiry’s) its recommendations.”

Many of the recommendations laid out in the report deal with procedures directly at City Hall. It is set to be considered at next week’s council meeting.

Thus far, the inquiry has cost the city upwards of $28 million.