No new money to fix ‘most dangerous’ road where Stafford fire truck crashed

STAFFORD — A fire truck crashed on Sunday while traveling one of the most dangerous streets in Stafford County.

The truck had been dispatched from fire station 14 on Shelton Shop Road to a car crash at the intersection of Garrisonville and Aquia roads, on the Stafford/Fauquier County line.

The truck never made it. It’s tire left the narrow, wet roadway, causing the truck to fishtail, and then to crash into the wood line near Rockhill Church Road. No one was injured.

The fire department, for the time being, is short a fire truck.

“We’ll see if it can be repaired, but most likely it can’t be,” said Stafford County Fire and Rescue Chief Joe Cardello.

The heavily-damaged truck is 10 years old, and the department had planned to keep it running for at least another two years.

The crash occurred on one of the worst stretches of roadway in the county. The narrow two-lane portion of Garrisonville Road, between Joshua Road and Arrowhead Drive, ranks in the top 10 of most dangerous streets with under 1,700 cars per day.

That was the finding from a year-long, internal county study that wrapped up in January which took an in-depth look at county streets, ranking them from best to worst. The study looked at crash rates, the amount of traffic, and current infrastructure conditions, like pavement and shoulder width.

Many roads in the county, like this portion of Garrisonville Road, don’t have shoulders. The study was used to identify which roads needed to be improved and ranked those improvements by order of importance.

The Board of Supervisors the following month effectively decided to shelve the study, citing insufficient funds to start the projects outlined, which could cost the county hundreds of millions of dollars. Those leaders also, collectively, also lacked the desire to borrow money for the projects.

The other idea that had been talked about — letting voters decide to borrow the money in a November bond referendum — also seems unlikely. Any funds that would have been allocated by the county would come in addition to state funding provided to the Virginia Department of Transportation to maintain the roads.

Neighboring Prince William County started maintaining and building its own roads, going above and beyond the support received from the state, in 1988 with the construction of Prince William Parkway.

The Board of Supervisors on May 21 will vote on its annual Capital Improvement Projects list, the final piece of the annual budget process. That $224 million list of county-funded construction projects includes a renovation of Ferry Farm Elementary School, a rebuild of Hartwood Elementary School, a $120 million soon-to-be-built sixth high school (the county’s most recent high school, Stafford High School opened in 2015 at a cost of $67 million), and a new $40 million replacement courthouse.

There are no road improvement projects on the list.