Police say a wrong-way driver was killed in a crash on I-290 in Northboro, Massachusetts, late Wednesday night.
It’s the latest in a series of tragic wrong-way crashes on state roadways, which the state has been working to prevent.
On Wednesday, just before 9 p.m., state police received multiple 911 calls reporting a wrong-way motorist in a Subaru driving west on I-290 east in Northboro.
“When troopers got on the scene, they discovered the wrong-way driver had collided with another car near mile marker 29,” state police said in a statement.
The Northboro fire department said that both the Subaru and a Jeep were on fire when they arrived, and officers were attempting to extinguish the flames.
The Jeep driver fled the wreckage and was transferred to UMass Memorial Medical Centre with what the fire department described as “non-life-threatening injuries”.
The Subaru driver died on the scene. State police confirmed that the driver was driving the wrong way. It took Northboro firefighters about an hour to get that person out of the automobile.
The drivers have not yet been identified by officials.
The stretch of roadway beginning at Exit 28 was closed for several hours for the enquiry. It reopened early on Thursday morning.
Massachusetts is now working on a “massive expansion” of its wrong-way driving prevention system in the aftermath of a State Police trooper’s death on Route 1 in Lynnfield last month. Nearly a week later, a wrong-way vehicle struck a state trooper’s cruiser on the same stretch of roadway near Peabody. Both the driver and the trooper survived.
On June 20, a driver who escaped a police stop died in a wrong-way crash on Route 146 in Millbury, Massachusetts. The other motorist sustained non-life-threatening injuries.
A pilot programme launched in 2022 placed wrong-way traffic-detecting equipment on 16 highway ramps in Massachusetts. The state is currently spending tens of millions of dollars to install the systems in 430 places.
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