A 31-year-old Stratford woman is in critical condition at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Bridgeport after crashing her car on Roosevelt Drive in Derby early Thursday.
Police are investigating.
Derby police said they responded to a report of a one-car crash at 12:45 a.m., when Caitlin Carpenter was heading west on Roosevelt Drive and veered off the road. Her vehicle hit a tree stump, flipped onto its side and came to rest upright in the east-bound lane, police said.
Derby emergency responders used Hurst tools — often called the ​“jaws of life” — to cut Carpenter out of the wreckage in order to get her to the hospital.
The accident happened within ​“Pink House Cove,” a roughly one-mile stretch of road between Cullens Hill Road and Lakeview Terrace.
Local and state lawmakers have been pressing the state Department of Transportation to scrutinize the road after 29-year-old Nicole McDonald, of Seymour, died in a head-on crash there July 29.
McDonald was the fourth person to die in the one-mile stretch since 2010.
A story published by the Valley Indy earlier this month showed that while several agencies met about Roosevelt Drive last year, little was accomplished. The story also had crash data for every wreck on Pink House Cove between 2010 and 2012.
On July 31, six Valley lawmakers — state representatives Theresa Conroy, Linda Gentile, Themis Klarides and David Labriola, along with state senators Joseph Crisco and Rob Kane — sent a letter to DOT Commissioner James Redeker asking his agency to take another look at Roosevelt Drive (state Route 34) from the Stevenson Dam in Oxford to the Derby-Shelton bridge.
“Considering the nature of this stretch of road, the amount of traffic that runs through the area, and the characteristics of the road, we believe that the Department of Transportation should address this concerning situation before yet another fatality takes place,” the lawmakers wrote.
Specifically, the lawmakers asked Redeker to push forward with a project to improve the intersection of Route 188 and Route 34 in Seymour.
The DOT honcho responded with a letter of his own, saying his agency is studying Pink House Cove and has met with Derby officials Aug. 6 and Aug. 19.
“Signing upgrades, installation of radar speed signs, a pedestrian activated warning system at Lakeview Avenue and centerline rumble strips are possible measures that are being discussed,” Redeker said in the letter.
The commissioner said that after the Derby stretch is studied, the DOT will then look at the road along Roosevelt Drive in Oxford and Seymour.
The concerns over Route 34 are not limited to elected officials. At a Seymour Board of Selectmen meeting Aug. 20, Housatonic Terrace resident Kisha Baker urged her representatives to petition the state to make Route 34 safer.
“My neighborhood has been touched by tragic events on this road many times,” Baker said.
She also requested police patrol the road more often to slow motorists down. Baker said she’s almost been in accidents caused by motorists passing in no-passing zones.
Seymour First Selectman Kurt Miller, referencing the letter from the Valley delegation, said ​“they’ll be putting substantial pressure on the DOT to get something done.”
Derby resident Christopher Bowen, who grew up in Seymour off Route 34, authored a blog post Aug. 20 detailing some of the grisly crashes he has witnessed on the road.
“I’m tired of hearing about, seeing, and cleaning up dead people off of my road, a road that should be more famous for the scenery on the river than it is for the scenery on the walls,” Bowen wrote.