After fatal Highway 30 crash injured 13 Guard members, an Oregon community pushes for a safety fix

A 65-year-old driver crossed into oncoming traffic on a two-lane stretch of U.S. Highway 30 in northwest Oregon on the night of Sept. 12, setting off a four-vehicle chain-reaction crash that killed him and sent 13 Oregon National Guard soldiers to the hospital. The soldiers were riding in a van and a pickup truck, returning from a training exercise at Camp Rilea near the coast when the wreck occurred, according to the Oregon State Police's official release, distributed through its news office and republished in full by the Tillamook County Pioneer.

Four days later, three of those soldiers remained hospitalized, and the crash has become the catalyst for a new push by residents near the crash site to have the highway formally designated a state safety corridor, a status that can bring added patrols and doubled traffic fines to a road that already carries a long record of serious wrecks.

What happened

Oregon State Police say the crash unfolded just before 9 p.m. near milepost 85 on Highway 30, about 12 miles east of Astoria. A black Ford Ranger pickup driven by Markham Marshall Stangland, 65, of Warrenton was headed westbound when it crossed into the eastbound lane for reasons investigators have not determined. The Ranger first sideswiped a Ram 1500 pickup driven by Jaden Vinay Govindan, 25, of Aloha, then continued into the path of an eastbound Ford Transit van carrying 11 Guard soldiers, driven by Raiden Cunningham, 21, of Milwaukie. A fourth vehicle, a Ford F-100 driven by Gregory Louis Wavra, 29, of Longview, Washington, could not stop in time and struck both the Ranger and the van.

Stangland was pronounced dead at the scene. Troopers said he did not appear to have been wearing a seatbelt. The van's driver suffered serious injuries; the drivers of the other two vehicles were treated for minor injuries. Highway 30 was closed for about four hours while investigators worked the scene, according to the Oregon Public Broadcasting account of the crash. The cause of Stangland's lane departure remains under investigation.

The numbers

Eighteen people in all were involved across the four vehicles, a scale that triggered a mass-casualty response from fire departments and ambulance crews in Clatskanie, Knappa and Astoria, along with the Clatsop County Sheriff's Office, Astoria police and the Washington State Patrol. Of the 15 Guard members traveling in the two military vehicles, 13 were transported to area hospitals. As of Wednesday, three remained hospitalized, four days after the crash, according to a report in Stars and Stripes. One person died. The soldiers belonged to units based in the Portland and Clackamas area, traveling home from a training rotation at Camp Rilea, a 2,000-acre state military installation on the coast that has trained Oregon Guard units since 1927, according to the Oregon Military Department.

Nationally, seatbelt non-use remains a significant factor in fatal crashes: of the passenger-vehicle occupants killed in wrecks in the most recent year with complete data, nearly half were not wearing a seatbelt when restraint use was known, according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data. Investigators have not said whether that factor contributed to the severity of Stangland's injuries, though troopers noted he was unrestrained at the time of the crash.

A road with a history

The stretch of Highway 30 through Clatsop County has drawn scrutiny before. Just weeks earlier, on Aug. 18, an 86-year-old Astoria driver was killed nearby, near milepost 80, when a pickup rear-ended her stopped sedan and ejected her from the vehicle. Residents who live along the corridor say serious crashes have become a familiar, unwelcome rhythm on the two-lane highway, which connects Columbia River communities like Svensen, Knappa and Westport with Astoria and, ultimately, Portland.

That history is now driving a fresh campaign. Holly Larkins, who lives near Svensen close to where Saturday's crash occurred, has begun organizing a group called "Safe Highway 30" to press the Oregon Department of Transportation to consider the corridor for a formal safety designation. "We can hear the sirens. So when there's accidents, you hear the sirens go off, and we heard them that night," Larkins told Oregon television station KOIN, in comments republished by The Astorian. If ODOT approves a safety corridor designation, it can bring additional law enforcement patrols, public-outreach campaigns and doubled traffic fines to a roadway, tools the state has used elsewhere in an attempt to change driver behavior on high-crash routes.

Who is affected

The most immediate toll fell on the Guard soldiers and their families. The units involved routinely rotate through weekend and evening training at Camp Rilea, and the Sept. 12 trip was a return leg from one of those exercises, according to Lt. Col. Stephen Bomar, the Oregon Military Department's public affairs director, who confirmed the total number of service members involved and their unit assignments to reporters this week. Beyond the soldiers, the crash has rattled a small, tightly knit stretch of the Oregon coast where fatal wrecks reverberate through communities that measure population in the hundreds. Families of drivers Govindan, Cunningham and Wavra were also affected, though their injuries were less severe than initially feared for two of the three.

Local elected officials framed the crash as part of a broader, recurring problem for coastal Oregon communities that depend on a highway many say has not kept pace with the volume and speed of modern traffic. Oregon House Republican Leader Lucetta Elmer offered condolences to "the family and loved ones of all parties involved," while State Rep. Cyrus Javadi, whose district includes the crash site, connected the wreck to a longstanding funding debate over rural road maintenance.

"This is, unfortunately, another painful reminder that we have serious safety challenges on our coastal highways. Highway 30 is a vital connection for our communities, and we need to keep working to make it safe for the people who depend on it every day," said State Rep. Cyrus Javadi.

Reaction and what happens next

Oregon State Police say the investigation into why Stangland's pickup crossed the center line is continuing, and no citations or findings on cause have been announced. The agency has not said whether toxicology results or a mechanical inspection of the vehicles are expected, standard steps in fatal-crash investigations of this kind.

For the National Guard, officials say the priority remains the recovery of the three soldiers still hospitalized, though none of their conditions have been described as life-threatening in updates so far this week. The Oregon Military Department has not indicated whether it will change protocols for soldiers commuting to and from training assignments at Camp Rilea, a facility that regularly moves guard units along the same coastal highways.

The community push for a safety corridor designation is now in ODOT's hands. Such requests typically require the agency to evaluate a road's crash history against statewide averages before granting the designation, a process that can take months. Larkins and other residents say they intend to keep collecting signatures and testimony in the meantime, hoping the momentum from a crash involving uniformed service members will succeed where earlier, quieter deaths on the same stretch of road did not.