Woman Driving Kids Home Hits 400-Pound Bear on I-26, Calls for Wildlife Passage After Car was Totaled

One night, a mother driving her kids home on I-26 collides with a 400-pound bear. She is now pleading for help in her petition to allow passage for wildlife.

On October 26, shortly after 7 o'clock, Jennifer Pharr Davis was returning home from dinner with her parents in Hendersonville on I-26 when, immediately after she crossed the Blue Ridge Parkway overpass, a massive 400-pound bear leaped "superman position" off the median directly in front of her car.

Davis said that really, there was no reaction time. The airbags deployed, and there was a significant impact when she struck the bear. She was driving a Toyota Prius, which sustained significant damage when it was struck at 60 mph by a really large bear.

According to Davis, as she was attempting to simply cross over to a safe area of the interstate, her kids in the back began to cry, asking what had happened.

Wildlife Passage Petition

Despite the Prius being totaled, Davis and her kids were unharmed. Davis's thoughts immediately turned to the safety of the wildlife that, much like the bear she hit, attempted to cross I-26 near the Blue Blue Ridge Parkway and also the French Broad River. Davis is the founder of the Blue Ridge Hiking Co. and is also a well-known hiker, backpacker, and author.

The following day, she created a petition on the Change.org website with the title "Safe Wildlife Passageway for I-26 Asheville." Her petition urges the addition of wildlife passages and perhaps other mitigations close to the scene of her accident. Some details of the crash are also included in the petition write-up.

On her petition, Davis stated that the tow truck driver had stated that it was the fifth black bear accident to occur this week on that section of I-26.

By the evening of November 16, the petition had amassed more than 3,500 signatures.

Scrapped Plans

According to NCDOT spokesperson David Uchiyama, the North Carolina Department of Transportation did consider including wildlife passages in the I-26 project before work on it began in 2019. However, after analyzing crash data from 2009 to 2012, engineers concluded that the passages would not significantly lower the frequency of collisions, especially given the stretch's high density of bridges, culverts, and other accessible crossings for wildlife.

According to Uchiyama, only 6% of all crashes involved an animal, including deer collisions, according to their analysis, which was requested by the North Carolina Wildlife Resource Commission. The data showed no discernible trends in the collisions, and there was no area with a high concentration of collisions along the 22.2-mile corridor.

Davis said that given that all the construction tools and workers are already on site, this would be a great time to update those plans and include some wildlife crossing mitigation measures, such as passages or fences. But according to Jeff Hunter, the National Parks Conservation Association's Southern Appalachian Director, it might not be that simple.

The best time to include that, according to Hunter, would have been during the planning stage several years ago. In part because of his years of work assisting in the creation of secure highway crossings for wildlife, Hunter was recently awarded Wildlife Conservationist of the Year in the North Carolina Wildlife Federation's Governor's Conservation Awards, Yahoo News reports.

Animals need room to move

According to Liz Hillard, a senior wildlife biologist for the Appalachian region from Wildlands Network, wildlife passages have benefits that go beyond simply saving the lives of the animals that choose to cross. The most obvious reason that wildlife passages are important is that they keep animals from being struck by cars.

According to Hillard, it is not practical to simply keep animals away from roads and assume they will be okay from a conservation standpoint. She stated that fragmenting animal populations with impassable roads can obstruct the exchange of genetic information, which is necessary for healthy populations, Citizen Times reports.