GARFIELD - Debris and diesel littered the pavement on U.S. Highway 62 Tuesday morning and traffic was stalled while emergency personnel worked the two-vehicle accident in which one man was killed.
“He came over ... I couldn’t avoid him,” truck driver Alvie Arnold said of the driver of the white pickup truck that hit his truck on U.S. 62 just north of the entrance to the Pea Ridge National Military Park.
The driver of the truck, a white male from Seligman, Mo., was pronounced dead on the scene by coroner Daniel Oxford.
Emergency personnel from Northeast Benton County Fire/EMS Department responded to the scene. A Benton County Sheriff’s deputy assisted.
Arnold, 58, of Colcord, Okla., has been driving for Cargill for 12 years. He just received his new 2013 Kenworth straight box truck last Thursday and was taking a truck load of live chicks from Gentry to a farm in Seligman, Mo., driving on U.S. Highway 62 when he was unable to avoid a collision, he said.
The Toyota Tundra hit the left front wheel of the Kenworth, then the fuel tank, ripping it open and spilling more than 100 gallons of diesel on the highway. The pickup truck traveled off the north side of the highway striking a tree before stopping.
Mike Dixon, deputy director of Environmental Management, arrived on scene to oversee the cleanup of the fuel.
“We will arrange for it to be cleaned up,” Dixon said of the diesel.
A 29-year-old man from Cassville, Mo., was driving behind the Cargill truck.
He didn’t want his name published, but said that he saw the pickup truck “come over the hill and drift over”into the path of the Cargill truck.
The identification of the deceased was being withheld pending notification of next of kin.
News, Pages 1 on 03/13/2013