LOVELOCK - The Nevada Highway Patrol said cattle on the highway were the cause of two accidents in the early morning hours of Nov. 10 on Interstate 80 near the TA Travel Center in Mill City.
Nevada Department of Public Safety Highway Patrol Public Information Officer Jim Stewart reported that at 4 a.m. a GMC pick-up driven by John Francois from Henderson came upon a black cow in the westbound fast lane. By the time Francois saw the cow in the dark, he was unable to react and struck the cow around the 150 mile marker on I-80.
The pick-up was badly damaged and Francois was taken to Humboldt General Hospital with minor injuries, Stewart said.
Shortly after the first collision, at approximately 4:18 a.m., a semi-truck registered to Southern Wine and Spirits out of Las Vegas, driven by Mark Monaghan from Reno, was traveling eastbound on I-80. Around the 149 mile marker the driver hit three cows, causing the semi to overturn, hit the guard rails and slide on its side over the Mill City/Unionville overpass, taking out 130 yards of the guard rail, Stewart said.
The driver emerged from the wreckage unhurt, Stewart said, but all three cows were killed. The eastbound side of the highway was closed for several hours at the 149 exit. Traffic was rerouted off the exit and back onto the highway, Stewart said.
"That part of the interstate is not open range. There are other sections of the interstate that isn't fenced in, but this part of the highway was fenced," Stewart said.
Stewart said that his reports did not indicate how the cows came to be on the highway. He said that the cattle belonged to the John Thacker Ranch in Unionville.
In a phone interview with Thacker he said that he now lives in Fallon and was still trying to piece together the chain of events that allowed his cattle to travel onto the highway. Thacker's grazing rights are on the east side of the highway, he said. He speculates that the cattle went through a gate for a storm drain that goes under the highway in the vicinity of the overpass where the cattle were hit. When the cattle reached the underpass there is no cattle guard on the west side of the highway to prevent the cattle from getting on the highway.
"If there was a cattle guard there (on the west side of the highway) they wouldn't have gotten back on the freeway," Thacker said.
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