At just past six on the morning of August 28, a truck on the Maritsa highway lost its left front tire, crossed two separate dividing guardrails at the 85th kilometer, entered the oncoming lane and came to rest in an agricultural field. Nobody died, for one reason only, which is that the oncoming lane happened to be empty at that moment. The 36-year-old driver tested negative for alcohol and was taken to hospital in Haskovo for examination.
That crash was notable in Bulgaria this summer only for its lack of casualties. Over the preceding ten weeks the country recorded a sequence of incidents in which vehicles passed through central barriers on motorways that were built precisely to stop them, and the cumulative death toll reached at least eight.
Ten weeks, one pattern
The sequence that pushed the issue into national politics began on June 24 at the 290th kilometer of the Trakia highway between Sofia and Burgas. A truck traveling at roughly 90 kilometers an hour in the middle lane crossed the median and struck a car carrying five people. Two nine-year-old boys from the F.C. Slavia football academy, traveling to a tournament in Albena, and the father of one of them were killed. Their coach, 46-year-old Ivan Terziyski, and his 49-year-old wife survived with severe injuries, hers life-threatening. Slavia president Ventseslav Stefanov, describing footage of the crash, said the truck had crossed the barriers as though they were waffles. Supervising prosecutor Zhivko Iliev subsequently ruled out both of the explanations that had circulated immediately afterward, stating there was no evidence the driver fell asleep or that the truck suffered a tire failure. Yambol police chief Dobrin Dimitrov revealed the driver had accumulated twenty penalties, four administrative acts and sixteen paid fines.
