A 34-year-old Morinville woman is in hospital this weekend after her car smashed through the Welcome to St. Albert sign north of St. Albert Thursday morning.
RCMP routed traffic around a portion of Hwy. 2 headed south into St. Albert Thursday morning for about an hour and a half after a red Ford Fiesta crashed into the brick Welcome to St. Albert sign just west of the road at about 7:15 a.m.
It looks like the car was travelling south when it veered onto the west shoulder of the road into the ditch and hit the sign, said Cpl. Laurel Scott of the RCMP’s K-Division headquarters. No other vehicles were involved in the collision.
Photos taken by city resident Bill Wolfe, who drove past the site at about 7:45 a.m, suggest that the car smashed clean through the east half of the sign, obliterating all but the letters “bert” and the word “Life.”
“Half the sign was gone.”
Wolfe said he saw multiple ambulances and police cars on scene, as well as one set of skid marks in the grass leading directly towards the car and the sign.
“It looks like (the driver) drove straight into the sign.”
Wolfe said this was one of the most serious accidents that he’d ever seen, noting that the sign was a heavy brick wall. The sun would have been to the driver’s left at the time of the accident, and road conditions were clear and dry.
STARS Air Ambulance flew the lone occupant and driver of the vehicle, a 34-year-old woman from Morinville, to an Edmonton hospital for treatment, Scott said. As of Friday, the woman had undergone surgery and was listed in serious, but stable, condition, having suffered cracked ribs, a broken nose, and other injuries. Police reopened Hwy. 2 at about 9 a.m.
Police were still determining the cause of the accident as of Friday, and had yet to determine if speed, alcohol, medical, or mechanical issues were involved. Scott confirmed that the car’s airbag did deploy and that the car was not stolen.
The sign itself is the property of the City of St. Albert, unlike the digital sign down the road owned by the St. Albert & District Chamber of Commerce. It went up about two years ago, and resembles the much-older entrance sign on the south side of town.
City crews have fenced off the sign pending its evaluation by an engineer and are attempting to contact its builder to see if any of it can be salvaged, said city public works director Tony Lake. The sign was insured, and will likely cost $50,000 to $55,000 to repair.
“Our biggest concern is the well-being of the driver,” he said – the wall was made of cinderblock and brick and was roughly 30 centimetres thick.
