Chain-reaction crash on snowy road involved 25 vehicles
By Lynn Moore
The Muskegon Chronicle
MUSKEGON, Mich. (AP) - Jan. 7, 2015: Jeremy Dykstra remembers that chaotic day like it was yesterday.
He remembers the elderly woman on her way to visit her sister in hospice whose car he had just pulled from a snowy ditch. He remembers seeing car after car lose control as they passed him by and thinking to himself "it was only a matter of time."
He remembers the semitrailer that jackknifed right behind his wrecker and the second semi, too, the one that shoved the first semi into his Eagle Towing truck. He remembers the sounds after that - the crunch of metal on metal as 40 cars plowed into each other on that snowy, slippery stretch of U.S. 31.
"It was a sound you'd never forget," Dykstra told The Muskegon Chronicle. "It seemed like it lasted forever."
It must have been then that the adrenaline kicked in. He quickly put the woman he was helping into the backseat of what by then was her smashed-up car and moved it off the road. He raced to a car that had become wedged beneath the second semitrailer, its roof caved in, and managed to free it with his damaged wrecker.
"You're thinking, 'This is not going to end well for anybody,'" Dykstra said.
A registered nurse appeared and together they began helping the three occupants who it turned out escaped serious injury.
He moved on, recovering about eight cars that had been part of the smash-up. In all, about six tow companies responded to the chain-reaction crash that occurred just south of Riley Thompson Road and initially was believed to involve 25 vehicles.
"It was like a war zone," Dykstra said. "Every time you looked up you got a ghostly feeling."
Dykstra's actions that day resulted in him receiving the American Towman Medal, the towing industry's "most prestigious honor." That's according to Dennie Ortiz, publisher of American Towman magazine, which bestows the medal to "towers who put their own lives at risk to save the life of another human being."
The medal includes this inscription: "For the Simple Act of Bravery."
Tow truck drivers typically don't get much recognition, yet they help us out of all types of unfortunate messes. Whether it's changing a tire on the side of a freeway, or moving a crunched vehicle out of a busy intersection, wrecker operators regularly find themselves in dangerous situations.
When he was in Baltimore recently to accept his American Towman Medal, Dykstra was moved by the story of another of the three recipients. His name was Fred Scroggs Jr., and he was honored posthumously.
Scroggs, 25, died in October when a vehicle hit him as he changed a tire on the side of I-275 in the Detroit area. The driver who hit him died as well, and Scroggs is credited for saving the life of the woman whose tire he was changing. He made sure she was inside her vehicle as he worked on the car, noting the potential for danger, according to published reports.
The prevalence of distracted driving is increasing the risk wrecker drivers face, Dykstra said, saying the driver who hit Scroggs reportedly died with his cell phone still in his hand.
"We're losing wrecker drivers at a very alarming rate," he said.
It's not widely known, and Dykstra wishes it was, that Michigan's "Move Over" law enacted in 2001 includes wrecker operators. The law requires drivers to move over, if on multi-lane roads, or slow down for emergency vehicles stopped along the side of a road with emergency lights activated. Wreckers were added to that list of emergency vehicles in 2004.
Dykstra, of Egelston Township, was a lighting technician who was tired of the constant travel required of his job when he stumbled onto his new profession 12 years ago.
He'd had some car trouble and called a wrecker for help.
"I ended up getting my car towed and I said, 'Man, that looks like a cool job,'" Dykstra said. "So here we are."
Intent on being viewed as a "professional" in his vocation, Dykstra has committed himself to training. He rattles off a list of certifications he's received: Level 2 Master Tower for the Towing and Recovery Association of America; light and medium duty certification from the North American Towing Academy; and the highest certification available from Wreckmaster Inc. He's also on a NASCAR race recovery team.
"It's an interesting job. I have a lot of fun at it," Dykstra said. "It's got me hooked, if you don't mind the pun."
Published: Thu, Dec 10, 2015
