By Eric Francis

9/12/23

QUECHEE - An orange dump truck belonging to Vermont’s Agency of Transportation was involved in a head-on collision with a bus-sized camper towing a Jeep pickup truck behind it Monday morning on a stretch of Route 4 just east of the Quechee Gorge.

First responders discovered the driver of the VTrans truck in cardiac arrest and worked frantically at the scene to revive him before he was transported by a Hartford ambulance to the Dartmouth Health Medical Center in Lebanon, where police said he remained in serious condition on Monday evening.

Photos by Eric Francis

Police would only initially identify the driver as a 54-year-old resident of Quechee.  Members of VTrans said at the scene that the man had been a driver for VTrans for quite a few years.

The two occupants of the camper, who were described as tourists passing through the area, were also taken to Dartmouth Health for treatment of relatively minor injuries, including a possible broken foot.

The crash happened shortly after 10 a.m. on a curving stretch of Route 4 right in front of Quechee Gorge Village. The rescue efforts, the crash investigation, and the clean-up of approximately 40 gallons of diesel fuel that spilled from a ruptured saddle tank on the dump truck ultimately caused central Vermont’s main east-west highway to remain closed for five hours.

Although the crash remains under an intense investigation that included a computer-mapping drone flight over the scene conducted by a member of the Vermont State Police Crash Reconstruction Team, it seemed clear on Monday morning that the large recreational vehicle, which had Ohio plates, was headed eastbound when the westbound dump truck struck it and then scraped clear down the left side of the camper before coming to a stop several vehicle lengths behind it in the eastbound lane.

In addition to emergency responders, Hartford and Lebanon police, and the state police, Vermont’s Department of Motor Vehicles sent an inspector to the scene to look over the state truck and a safety investigator from VTrans also arrived to help document the scene.

Hartford Police are asking anyone who might have additional information about the crash to contact Corporal Randy St. Peter of the Hartford Police Department at (802) 295-9425 or via E-mail [email protected]