ACCIDENTS AND DRIVERS ALONG THE DEADLY HIGHWAY (RCEA) | Appels d'Urgence | NT 1

Its name is the RCEA: the Central-European Atlantic Road, the highway that crosses France from East to West. But many call it the Highway of Death”. Because, along this route, there are twice as many serious accidents as on any other.And the risk is concentrated on a near 200-kilometer section that runs through the Allier. Every year more than twenty deaths are mourned upon it.A principal cause is the thousands of heavy trucks that daily take this road, which in places is barely wide enough for two of them to pass. Trucks make up nearly half of all vehicles. The majority of accidents are head-on collisions between a light vehicle and a heavy truck, and the consequences are often tragic.However, the danger also comes from the drivers themselves: dangerous overtaking, excess speed, failure to respect a safe distance… The Gendarmes wage a merciless war against these drivers who regularly turn this highway and its surroundings into a blacktop cemetery.Day and night, Appels d’Urgence had an inside look at the work of the emergency services and gendarmes, those guardian angels engaged in a daily against the drivers on the deadly highway…”