CHP: Highway 1 remains safe road despite two recent accidents

There were more than 3,500 deaths in California last year resulting from car accidents. It is a number that has remained fairly steady.

Highway 1 by Big Sur is one of the latest culprits. Saturday, a man drove through a right curve plunging nearly 300 feet to the bottom of a cliff.

A few miles away and three weeks earlier, Oregon woman Angela Hernandez swerved off the road trying to avoid an animal. She crashed about 200 feet down, surviving for seven days missing and alone.

“To say a road is dangerous… I don’t think that’s the case here,” said Ben Grasmuck, a sergeant in the California Highway Patrol.

Grasmuck worked Highway 1 in the Big Sur area for five years. He is retiring this week after 30 years of service with the CHP. He says while Highway 1 has high profile accidents, they are far and few between.

“I remember one year, I recovered three vehicles over the side, well over the side, one of them was 800 feet,” he said. “None of them were fatalities, fortunately. But they were three in one week, those were the only three I took all year. So it doesn’t happen that often.”

The highway patrol says really any road with a high volume of traffic could be more dangerous than Highway 1 simply because there are more drivers.

While Highway 1 itself may not be considered dangerous, bad things can still happen. There are plenty of barriers along Highway 1, but Grasmuck says building one at every point just is not feasible.

“It’s not practical to put a barrier along the entire roadway, you would spoil the whole trip because you wouldn’t be able to get to the turnouts,” he said.

The best rules of thumb are the obvious: don’t speed, don’t drink and drive and a little bit of courtesy cannot hurt either.

“Because people get impatient, they have places to go. And they may decide I’m going to pass anyway and make an unsafe pass,” said Grasmuck. “So please pull over and let the cars behind you go past you and then drive at a speed that you feel comfortable. Just don’t hold everybody else up.”