Crash detectives use wits, drones to piece together traumatic moments

Alberta has seen a number of deadly car crashes this summer involving multiple vehicles, fatalities and sometimes children.

Police go to the scene to try to piece together what happened, which can be a challenging job.

Sgt. Colin Foster, who is in charge of the collision reconstruction unit for Calgary Police Service, said the longest he's ever kept a road closed was a full day in 2013. It happened when a truck carrying a crane fell onto its side on DeerfootTrail in southeast Calgary.

One of the drivers, a 39-year-old father, died.

The officers who investigate the crash detectives must remain impartial and they have to get creative, bouncing ideas off each other to figure out what happened and why.

Mechanical issues are less common than you'd think; of the more than 700 crashes he's investigated, Foster says maybe two or three were due to a vehicle defect.

Normally it's human error, but to figure that out, the team relies on their wits and a handful of tools, such as drones, cameras, the car's so-called black box and sometimes even a magnifying glass.

Foster spoke to Calgary Eyeopenerhost David Grayon Monday to explain what goes into a collision investigation.

Q: Describe for me what you do when you first arrive at a scene.

A: When we first arrive at a scene, we look. Well the first thing I do is put my hands in my pockets so I can actually see what's in front of me.

I will then start to look at the evidence at the scene. I will look at tire marks or skid marks and I will look for damage to the road.

Iwill look at the vehicles and start to piece together what I think happened to cause this

Q: I understand you're one of the few units, perhaps the only one, to use drones. What do you use drones for?

A: So by changing your perspective of the actual scene, I'll be able to see different things. From up high at altitude, I can actually see tire marks sometimes a lot clearer than I can do at ground level or at standing height.

There's been a number of photographs of me and my colleagues lying in the roadway, again, just changing our perspective to see different things that we can't see at head height.

Q: It's within your power to close a road, even a major roadway. You make no apologies for that, do you?

A: No, not at all. When the collision happens, it's our one and only opportunity to actually gather the evidence.

Once we open that road, we've lost any opportunity to gather anything else we may have missed. So before we do open up roads, we want to make sure that we have absolutely everything.

The best way that I can describe it to the people that may be inconvenienced is that if this was your loved one who was seriously hurt or unfortunately killed, you'd want us to make sure that we have the best evidence, as much evidence as we can find, before we open that road.

Again, I make no apologies for it. I apologize for the inconvenience but I don't actually apologize for closing the road if I have to.

Q: Do you see major trends, things that happen again and again?

A:Time is the biggest problem. As we get faster and faster in how we drive or we're in a rush to cross the road, we don't pay attention to all the other things that are going on around us.

By giving ourselves time, by keeping to speed limits, by making sure we're aware, it allows us that time to see something that may be happening, taking the time to react to that and actually being able to avoid that collision.

The minute we start increasing our speed, or not paying attention, we reduce the time available to us, and that's unfortunately what leads to the crashes.

Q: Like most people when I hear the news in the morning of yet another car crash, and there have been many lately in Jasper, south of Calgary, the first thing that goes through my mind is, what went wrong? What happened?

A: And that's what we want to try and find out.

We look at three things with every crash. We look at the vehicle to see if there's a mechanical issue with the vehicle. We look at the environment, the road, was it weather conditions, was it the position of the sun.

And finally we look at the driver, and unfortunately in the majority of cases, it's usually driver error that leads to these unfortunate collisions.

Q: And you can determine that, even if you're there hours later? You can figure out whose fault it was?

A: As a reconstructionist, I don't look to see who is at fault. I look to see what happened. We're actually used by the courts to provide an opinion as to how this collision happened.

Sometimes we identify who's at fault and sometimes we actually provide evidence that exonerates drivers. There are times when, fortunately, a crash is literally that, it's an accident.

We don't tend to call them accidents. We call them collisions because a collision, someone's at fault.

We present our opinion to the court and we let the courts decide who may or may not be at fault.

Q: How often do you find your opinion challenged by the defence?

A: Very rarely.

Q: Why is that?

A: The way that we do our calculations and the way that do our investigation, it's a very unbiased opinion.

And in any event, the actual calculations we do are very much on the conservative side. In fact, we have had engineers talk to us after our presentations in court and say to us, "Oh, we can get this guy's speed up even higher."

That's all well and good. We have to make sure that the evidence we can provide in court is supported and is reasonable under the circumstances, and very rarely do we get challenged with opinions and our calculations.

Q: You deliver your findings dispassionately, as we are in this conversation, for obvious reasons. You're a professional. But it's not lost on me that you are walking into a scene that takes a very intimate look at the most traumatic moments of a person's life. How do you deal with that?

A: I've been doing crash investigations full time for about 10 years. I've been involved with them since I joined the police initially in 1987.

Some of us are more resilient to these type of investigations. Some of us are less so, and some of us just find it exceptionally traumatic.

The ones that will always affect us tend to be the ones involving kids because children are invariably not at fault for those type of collisions.

But someone has to do it, and while I can still do it, I'll continue to do so.

Q: Most of us listening to you this morning are drivers. What can we learn from the work that you do?

A: I think that it comes down to what I said earlier on: time. I've lost count the number of crashes I've been to and people say, "Oh, my brakes didn't work," or, "I didn't see them in time."

And I look at the scene and I'm seeing skid marks going into the crash. "Well, your brakes did work. The reason why your car didn't stop in time is because you were going too fast," or, "you weren't paying sufficient attention to what was happening in front of you to avoid that crash."

So again it comes down to, keep to those speed limits. Not a target, you got to get that speed and then a little bit over.

The limit is the limit and there's a reason for that. Because at that speed limit, there's still time for you to react to stuff that happens in front of you to avoid a major collision.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.Listen to the full interview with Sgt. Colin Foster:

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With files from Donna McElligott and the Calgary Eyeopener.