By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews
The mother of a young Waldport woman killed Jan. 11 in a collision with a Yachats ambulance has gone to court asking to be named as her personal representative to help prepare for filing a wrongful death lawsuit.
The petition was filed Wednesday by attorneys for Heide A. Stocker of Waldport on behalf of her daughter, Kelsey R. Seibel, 25. Seibel had two sons, Kayden, 5, and Ryan, 4.
Seibel’s car collided with a South Lincoln Ambulance ambulance driven by Yachats Rural Fire Department firefighter/EMT at 5:16 p.m. Jan. 11 as the ambulance pulled out of the department’s driveway and onto U.S. Highway 101. It was headed to a high priority call at the Sea Aire assisted living facility just to the south.
Seibel died at the scene. Her passenger, Fokus Simmons, 16, of Waldport was critically injured and taken by ambulance to Good Samaritan Medical Center in Corvallis. He was in fair condition Wednesday, the hospital said. His mother, Elizabeth Wonson of Waldport, has been at the hospital since.
Oregon State Police said neither Seibel or Simmons were wearing seatbelts and the Kia Soul’s airbags did not deploy.
The fatal wreck and injury has shaken much of the Waldport community and Waldport High School, where Simmons is a sophomore.
School officials said Simmons was a member of the boy’s jayvee basketball team this season and last fall was a linebacker and offensive lineman on the varsity football team. As a freshman he wrestled and played football.
On Tuesday, the high school’s booster club held a fundraiser before and during the girls’ and boys’ varsity basketball games with Reedsport High School, whose team members also bought commemorative T-shirts from Irish boosters and donated a $250 gift certificate. Tuesday night’s event raised $9,800 to help Simmons’ mother with expenses while he heals.
Wednesday’s petition said that although the accident is still under investigation by Oregon State Police, Stocker and her representatives need access to Seibel’s car, which is being held by a towing company in South Beach and cannot be released to anyone but a representative of her estate.
“In the meantime, there are actions that need to be taken on behalf of the decedent’s estate to protect the decedents assets, if any, and gather evidence related to the wrongful death claim for her heirs …” said attorney Traci McDowall of Newport.
The petition did not indicate who might be sued — the nonprofit ambulance service, the fire district or both.
In an email to YachatsNews, McDowall said her firm is saddened by the tragedy “and recognize the impact it has had on many people in our community.”
“A mother was lost, leaving two young children, and another young life impacted tremendously,” her statement said. “Yaquina Law will be conducting a full examination of the facts that led to this accident in the coming days, weeks and months to come.”
A GoFundMe campaign for Seibel organized by her sister-in-law said that she and her sons were going through a hard time. “They were living out of her car or staying with relatives when they could so unfortunately her boys have close to nothing,” the fundraising message said.
South Lincoln Ambulance and the Yachats fire department have an unusual – and possibly unique — arrangement for emergency service agencies in Oregon.
South Lincoln is a longtime Yachats nonprofit which owns the 2017 ambulance, its equipment, radios and much of the office equipment in the five-year-old fire station on the north side of the city. The ambulance is staffed with Yachats firefighters under a year-to-year contract between the nonprofit and the fire district board.
South Lincoln has a five-member board whose president is Shelby Knife and secretary is Frankie Petrick. Knife is also the fire district’s assistant administrator and Petrick is the fire district’s main administrator and its volunteer chief.
SLA holds one of five five-year contracts with Lincoln County to provide 9-1-1 emergency ambulance service in the sprawling fire district, which runs from the south edge of Waldport, through Yachats, up the Yachats River valley and south past Cape Perpetua. Pacific West Ambulance, a for-profit company based in Hillsboro, provides ambulance service for the rest of the county.
Speed, signal questions
State police released the ambulance from evidence on Monday, and it is being stored at the fire station until an insurance adjuster can determine if it can be repaired.
In the meantime, South Lincoln is using a spare PacWest ambulance to handle calls in the Yachats area.
Petrick said Monday that the ambulance driver, Casey Wittmeier, who joined the fire district in 2019 as a firefighter/EMT, is taking paid time off and can go on administrative leave if necessary.
Petrick and the fire district’s board have complained internally for years about the posted 55 mph speed limit on the highway at the long entrance to their station, which moved from downtown Yachats to the north edge of the city in 2019.
But in a response to an inquiry from YachatsNews, the Oregon Department of Transportation said that while the Jan. 11 fatality is tragic, there is little history of crashes, the speed at the north edge of Yachats is appropriate, and that the agency “typically would not install” a flashing emergency vehicle warning sign near the station.
“We need to be consistent with how we address crashes,” ODOT spokeswoman Mindy McCartt said in an email to YachatsNews. “This driveway already has the fire station sign and relatively good sight distance on this flat tangent segment of state highway. An emergency vehicle responding would be visible so ODOT typically would not install the emergency vehicle warning sign.”
McCartt said the change from a posted 40 to 55 mph speed limit is at the north Yachats city limits at Overleaf Lodge Lane. In December 2020, McCartt said, ODOT investigated extending the existing 40 mph zone farther north, but the agency’s criteria are different when outside city limits.
“The investigation recommended retaining the existing statutory 55 mph zone based on 50th percentile speed, roadside culture/development and crash history,” McCartt said. “There likely has been no change in the parameters that a new investigation would make a different recommendation.”
McCartt also said the agency reviewed reported crashes from 2013 to 2022 for the quarter-mile segment of the highway between Forest Hills Lane and Diversity Lane. It found five – a 2013 pedestrian fatality near Diversity Lane, three crashes related to driveways north of the fire station, and one at the entrance to Overleaf Lodge.
As for emergency vehicle signs or flashers, McCartt said such a signal would be used only at locations where sightlines are restricted or the emergency vehicle entering traffic would be unexpected.
“ODOT typically does not install this warning sign unless the sight distance is such that a through vehicle cannot see the exiting vehicle — particularly when it has lights and sirens flashing,” McCartt said.
Even if ODOT won’t install a warning signal along Highway 101 near the fire station, it also would have to give the fire district permission to put one there – even on its own property.
“Any type of warning light (as a traffic control device) along the highway (even off right-of-way) is only allowed by the road authority,” McCartt said, “so the fire station cannot place a warning light/flasher on its property to act as a traffic control device.”
- Quinton Smith is the editor of YachatsNews.com and can be reached at YachatsNews@gmail.com
A young woman died. What would it hurt to move the 55 mph sign a hundred yards north? The e-mail from ODOT is the definition of heartless government-speak bureaucracy. We all know how people hit the gas peddle when they see that sign.
This is sad news, indeed.
It brings up a very important concern that this taxpayer has touched upon before in previous “Comments”…the relationship between South Lincoln Ambulance (SLA) and the Yachats Rural Fire Protection District (YRFPD).
As taxpayers, we carry an extra burden of supporting the SLA when our taxes are collected to support fire protection by the YRFPD. Now, we may also be saddled with the legal and medical fees of an incident that is purely an activity of the SLA.
This is just one more reason that these two businesses need to be separate entities.
An ambulance business could rent space at the fire station and carry their own employees and costs, leaving the YRFPD and the firefighters we are supporting with our taxes available for fires and safety related activities, not an ambulance service in disguise. The fire station would benefit from the rent collected and have more firefighters available, rather than sending them off on ambulance duty and leaving the fire trucks unattended in case of a fire.
Fires need to be responded to in a timely manner, and the current arrangement where they are mostly occupied with ambulance calls sabotages firefighter availability.
If you are unsure about the number of ambulance calls received compared to fire calls in this district, feel free to request the 911 records from the TRFPD…I did, and could clearly see the disproportion of ambulance calls to fire calls.
Thank you for taking the time to read and consider this taxpayer’s observations.
Katrina
Good information. Thank you. So sad all the way around.
I feel something should be done to prevent this from happening again
I don’t understand how separating the two agencies has anything to do with safety or that in doing so might have prevented this tragic accident. Regardless, ODOT has already made it clear that taxpayer input and volunteer chief Petrick along with the fire district’s board (local, citizens who are actually here, to visibly see and be involved in day after day) comments and input about signs of any kind has no bearing and means nothing. Decisions are made from what’s written in the procedures and policy manuals that were written by officials who are not directly involved, statistics, and other none concerning factors, that such unhuman decisions are made.
Hi Dick…I can’t speak for improving safety…only liability.
I’m not an attorney and can’t give legal advice.
From my amateur understanding, the ambulance is insured by the SLA, so they can be sued for the accident.
Yet, the driver can also be sued for negligence, or something like that, and they are an employ of the YRFPD, which then shifts the burden of responsibility to us, the taxpayers.
If the ambulance service was a separate business from the YRFPD, they would have their own employees and be solely responsible for accidents, such as this.
I hope this simple explanation helps in some way.
Katrina
HI Katrina Ok I get it now what you were talking about – a liability/legal issue rather than a safety/prevention issue.
This is a very sad situation. The agencies involved should brighten up that area, easy to add flashers and lower the speed. We have 20 mph school zones, why not the same for fire/ambulance? The court case will make both drivers look bad.
Five wrecks in the past 10 years is a lot for just that section of the highway. That alone should be enough to get a warning light of some kind at least. My heart goes out to the two little boys and the families of both Kelsey and Fokus. It’s such a tragedy. Breaks my heart for both mothers involved.
Airbags not deploying in a car that T boned another which resulted in a driver fatality sounds suspect to me. Was this a salvage title car? They are notorious for these sort of fatalities. Any tort lawyer worth their salt should be looking at that.
I appreciate this article, even though I don’t know the people involved… families impacted by crashes surely remain affected for weeks, or forever, but are often forgotten by media and society after initial crash reports. Some roadside memorials are maintained for years, and my thoughts go out to those families. Maybe it’s hard to know whether to reach out to crash survivors years later, to report publicly how they’re doing. But followup articles are a chance to hear what they can teach about crash recovery and crash prevention, if they’d like to share.
I also appreciate that this article shows a broader investigation than most crash reports — especially of road design at the incident site — and concludes with the spark of an idea that the way infrastructure is designed can cause or contribute to crashes & crash severity.
Speed limits are like bolts on an airplane door. Speeds set too high are like untightened bolts mid-flight. Why risk it?
Part of the reason is lack of choice: When I managed retail, a young employee, still learning to drive in the family’s only functioning car, had to turn left from an unsignaled cross-street onto Hwy 101 to get to work. Yet they drove. Closing time was after the day’s last bus, and continuous bike lanes and sidewalks don’t exist on the coast highway. They described being scared & stressed every time they made that turn due to the high traffic speeds. Not a fun way to start the work day.
Yet some industries still lobby ODOT hard for wider, faster design of our state highway systems (see: https://bikeportland.org/2024/01/24/trucking-advocates-say-theyve-been-squeezed-by-road-diets-want-to-change-oregon-bike-lane-law-383339).
But even language can be a way of lobbying (if inadvertently) for the deadlier status quo. Although people thought the speed limit foretold a crash, this incident is being described both as a “crash” and an “accident.” Attorneys, insurance agencies & even ODOT DMV’s “Accident Report Form” all refer to crashes as “accidents” even before investigations are complete. A too-high speed limit is known to be deadly combined with a recalled vehicle, bald tires, or one that is improperly operated. At lower speeds a crash could end up okay, or at least survivable. So, more than just part of the equation, road design seems to equate to OSHA’s “root” or “basic cause” in the System of Safety, where a crash would be “symptomatic” of something wrong in the system, therefore not really an accident.
I believe choice is part of transportation systems too, like being able to choose to drive slower than a speed limit for operational safety without being pressured by other drivers, or not drive a car at all. If late-night transportation options, like the City Loops & intercity buses, aren’t available to people who don’t want to, or shouldn’t, be driving at night, then are crashes truly accidents? If the community familiar with an area has been saying the speed limit there is too high, but the limit is left unchanged, is it truly an accident?
One moral to the tragic story may be to make speed limit concerns part of the public record by writing to ODOT, cc’ing city & state reps, to document requests for lower speeds at specific spots of concern. These emails will then be available for future review by journalists, etc.