A 52-year-old Petrolia man was slapped this week with a small fine linked to a crash in his hometown that nearby residents recalled sounded like a large explosion.
A 52-year-old Petrolia man was slapped this week with a small fine after a crash in his hometown that nearby residents recalled sounded like a large explosion.
“Like a bomb going off,” Doug Ritchie said shortly after the April 23, 2021, two-vehicle collision close to his home on Oil Heritage Road near Discovery Line. “That bang – you know what it is as soon as you hear it.”
Firefighters cut two people from a heavily damaged silver Ford Escape after it collided with a boat trailer being pulled by a white Ford F-150 that police said was improperly hitched. The driver of the Escape was wheeled away on a stretcher through a field of debris littering the busy highway between Petrolia and Wyoming to a nearby ambulance, although the local fire chief said he and his female passenger managed to escape serious injuries.
The pickup truck driver, a 50-year-old Petrolia man who declined at the time to give his name, said he was not injured. The pickup he was driving wasn’t visibly damaged, but the trailer and the Cobra bass fishing boat he was pulling were both destroyed.
Lambton provincial police announced a few days later they charged Paul Ainsworth, 50, from Petrolia with three Highway Traffic Act offenses of improper means of attachment, insecure load and improper braking system.
Eighteen months later, Ainsworth, now 52, pleaded guilty Wednesday in Sarnia’s provincial offenses court to improper means of attachment and was fined $85.
“It was found that the tongue-locking mechanism on the trailer that his vehicle was pulling was in the upright position, thus having an improper means of attachment,” Blake Turner, Lambton County’s municipal prosecutor, told the court.
The pickup truck driver told The Observer at the time he had just picked up the boat from a nearby farm in Enniskillen Township and was bringing it back to Petrolia when the trailer started bouncing as he drove south through the bottom of a hill on Oil Heritage Road . He tried to slow down and pull to the side.
“It was too late. It was sideways and another car came and, ‘Wham,’” he said. “It ripped right off.”
The Escape sat crumpled on the east side of the 90-kilometres-per-hour road that Friday afternoon with multiple wheels missing while the upturned boat and trailer were still on the road as firefighters worked to clear debris from the scene.
Ainsworth was given two weeks to pay the $85 fine, plus associated court costs. The improper brake system charge was withdrawn after he pleaded guilty to improper means of attachment while the insecure load charge did not appear on the docket.