A 70-year-old driver died Monday morning after trying to avoid a large object blocking a lane of southbound Interstate 15 in Rancho Bernardo, then losing control and slamming into the center divide. The crash was reported just before 8 a.m. near West Bernardo Drive, snarling one of North County’s busiest commuter corridors during the height of rush hour.
According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, the driver of a Toyota first swerved right to avoid the object, which was blocking a right lane, then lost control, veered left and struck the center divide. California Highway Patrol Officer Issam Wahhab said the object had also been struck by a Honda sedan in the same stretch of freeway, just north of West Bernardo Drive. Paramedics took the Toyota driver to a nearby hospital, where the driver was later pronounced dead, per the newspaper’s report citing Wahhab.
No other injuries were reported in the crash, and alcohol was not considered a factor, according to the same account. The exact nature and origin of the large object in the roadway have not been disclosed, and it remains unclear whether investigators have identified who left it there or whether it fell from a vehicle.
A Familiar and Dangerous Pattern on San Diego Freeways
The maneuver described by CHP — swerving to avoid an obstacle, then overcorrecting into a fatal impact — mirrors a well-documented national hazard. A study by the Automobile Club of Southern California found that nearly 37 percent of all deaths in road-debris crashes occur when a driver swerves to avoid an object and loses control of the vehicle. The same research found that road debris caused more than 200,000 crashes, 39,000 injuries, and 500 deaths nationwide over a four-year study period, with more than one in three crashes involving debris occurring between 10 a.m. and 3:59 p.m…