SAN ANTONIO – A North Side construction zone where a driver died after losing control of his car and crashing is seen as a headache by at least one other driver.
The area is along Wetmore Road just north of Wurzbach Parkway.
“Day to day, it’s crazy,” said Salvatore Carnevale, who lives nearby. “If you’re driving and not used to this area, you could wind up on the same lane as someone else and that’s a head-on collision right there.”
Driver dies after losing control of car in construction zone, hitting tree, police say
Cones and barrels that are set up block all northbound lanes of Wetmore in that immediate area, forcing the northbound traffic to utilize one of the southbound lanes.
As a result, southbound traffic is reduced to only one lane there.
San Antonio police say a 22-year-old man was driving in the section of that construction zone where five lanes of traffic suddenly are narrowed down to only two.
It appears the driver didn’t notice the construction barrels until it was too late, according to one investigator at the scene.
The man’s car veered across all lanes of traffic, jumped a sidewalk and crashed through the backyard fence of a home.
It then hit a tree, causing the death of the driver, who police say was not wearing a seatbelt.
They say they found him badly injured, tossed into the passengers’ seat.
The man, whose name was not released right away, died later at a hospital.
“At night, it’s pretty dark. So the cones are not really set up correctly,” Carnevale said, detailing his frustrations with the construction zone.
Accident investigators spent about two hours there, trying to understand what went wrong for the driver who was killed.
They shut down Wetmore Road in both directions, between Wurzbach Parkway and Ridge Country Street, while they investigated.