In Vermilion Parish, a homeowner is pleading for more patrols along his road because speeding drivers keep crashing into his fence and that of his neighbors.
The home is at the intersection of Kirk and Madison Road near Maurice.
You can still see pieces of the wooden fence and car parts scattered across the ground from a crash that happened Saturday night around 11:30.
Presley Broussard who owns the property with the knocked over fence says a driver was speeding down this road and went straight into his fence, also knocking down a power line. Broussard says he noticed the power was out from 11:30 to 4:30 the following morning because of the crash and it also affected several of his neighbors.
“This is the 14th time that they’ve run through my fence over the course of maybe 15 years. It’s not just me, they ran through my nephew’s fence right across the road here at least twice and then my sister across the road 2 or 3 times and then my other sister across the road twice,” said Broussard.
The speed limit along Kirk Road is 40 miles per hour. But Broussard says drivers don’t always obey that limit.
“The curve is a bad curve and of course if you’re not paying attention or you’re going too fast, of course the speed limit is 40 miles an hour but if you go 50 or 60 you’re going to have trouble making that curve. And the other thing is the road is not wide, it’s narrow,” he said.
The homeowner says repairs cost him a few thousand dollars each time he fixes the damage. Only two of the drivers who’ve hit the fence have offered to pay, leaving him to pay for repairs out of his own pocket.
“I refuse to fix it again because the next one’s going to run through it, not going to have insurance then I’m not going to have the money and I’m not going to have the fence,” he explained. “And of course [the fence is] not nailed, they’re slotted and when they hit that [the wood pieces] go flying. As you can see, they go flying all over the place like toothpicks.”
According to the Vermilion Parish Sheriff’s Office, Kirk Road has averaged 3 crashes a year over the past five years. A spokesman tells us the sheriff’s office is working to put more patrols to run radars in that area.
While we were at Broussard’s home, we saw a sheriff’s deputy patrolling the area and pulling over speeding drivers.
Broussard says he hopes they stick around and catch those drivers before someone gets killed.
“You can replace a car, this post and all this other stuff. Money can replace that but it can’t replace any lives. We lost a son in a boating accident 17 years ago so we know what that feels like,” he said.
