Powell Butte man cited in pickup-bike crash
Oregon State Police said Thursday they have cited a Powell Butte man following an investigation into an Aug. 12th serious injury bicycle-pickup crash along Hwy. 126 east of Powell Butte that put a global fund-raising cyclist in the hospital for several days.
Norman Chadwick, 44, was cited Wednesday by OSP for unsafe passing of a person operatnig a bicycle.
ORS (Oregon Revised Statutes) 811.065 states, “The driver of a motor vehicle may only pass a person operating a bicycle by driving to the left of the bicycle at a safe distance and returning to the lane of travel once the motor vehicle is safely clear of the overtaken bicycle. For the purposes of this paragraph, a ‘safe distance’ means a distance that is sufficient to prevent contact with the person operating the bicycle if the person were to fall into the driver’s lane of traffic.”
It’s a Class B traffic violation, according to OregonLaws.org which also offers more details about what the charge entails.
Around 4:45 p.m. on Aug. 12, Frederick Bouwman, 53, of Ontario, Canada, was riding a KOGA Miyata bicycle heading west along the paved shoulder Highway 126 near milepost 9 when he was struck from behind by the right front quarter panel and side mirror of a westbound 2003 GMC Sierra pickup driven by Chadwick, troopers said.
Bouwman, who was wearing a helmet, was thrown from his bike and seriously injured. He was flown to St. Charles Bend for treatment of serious but non-life-threatening injuries.
Bouwman, on an around-the-world bike trip to raise money for an orphanage, spent 10 days in the hospital, he said on his Facebook page, and will take several weeks to heal from a collapsed lung, bruised lungs, a fractured shoulder bone and 14 broken ribs.
” I took a pretty severe blow, to say the least, but miraculously, did not need surgery, nor was my heart or head damaged,” he wrote. “The back of my helmet was smashed, so that took a lot of the blow, and I am keeping that as a remembrance.”
