Screwdriver piercing windshield in P.E.I. prompts call for safety when carrying tools

Alyssa Wright of Kinkora wants people to make sure open loads are secure on back of vehicles

A Kinkora, P.E.I., woman is trying to raise awareness about the safe storage of tools in moving vehicles after a screwdriver flew off the back of a pickup truck and became impaled in her windshield. Alyssa Wright, 26, had just turned onto Route 225, the Kinkora Road, on July 10 and was heading to Charlottetown to do some shopping. Suddenly, a screwdriver flew out of the back of a pickup truck that was heading in the opposite direction toward Summerside.

The screwdriver lodged in the windshield on Wright’s side of the car, just below her line of sight. Glass shattered over her. “I had only made it a few feet up the road.

I laid on my horn as soon as it happened, but he never stopped,” Wright told The Guardian in a phone interview from her workplace in Tyne Valley on July 16. “I pretty much just screamed. My first reaction was just to scream.”

‘I’m very lucky’ Wright had the wherewithal to pull to the side of the road and call her sister and tell her what happened. Wright then decided to drive home since she lived so close by. “I think I was mainly just in shock that it happened.

I handle incidents pretty well.” Wright is not trying to track down the driver who was transporting the tools. But she wants her message to reach anyone travelling to make sure their loads are secure.

“I just want people to take a minute before they transport tools or garbage or anything in a truck or a trailer that has an open bed to just stop and think whether everything in the trailer is secure because it takes just one split second to change someone’s life,” Wright said. “I’m very lucky that it didn’t change mine. All I needed was a different windshield, but it could have been a much different situation.”

At a glance P.E.I.’s Highway Safety Act follows the National Safety Code for loose cargo. - Section 10 of the code states: No driver shall operate a commercial vehicle carrying cargo on a highway unless the cargo is contained, immobilized or secured in accordance with the requirements of the Cargo Securement Standard. Wright said had her mother or an elderly person been driving, the reaction to the screwdriver could have been different.

“If it had been someone else driving or had been a motorcycle or a cyclist, or even someone in a convertible, it could have been a completely different situation.” Wright said she called a windshield repair shop in Summerside and asked them if the car was drivable to get it repaired in the city. The shop told her to put some duct tape on the windshield and it completed the repairs on July 13.