LEEDS — A cross-country family trip and a visit to Cedar City ended just before noon Sunday for two families when an Airstream trailer being pulled by a Nissan pickup collided with a motor home on southbound Interstate 15.
No one was injured in the wreck at the southern end of the Leeds on-ramp at mile marker 22.
“We’ve been all over the country,” the man driving the motor home told St. George News. “We were headed home to Henderson.”
He said the pickup truck and trailer started to swerve in front of him and he tried to slow down but the trailer hit the median wall and slid across two lanes of traffic directly in front of him.
“I almost made it,” he said, looking at the mangled front end of his 35-foot motor home and the broken windshield lying on the ground.
The driver of the 2017 Nissan Frontier said he and his wife had been visiting in Cedar City and were on their way home to Las Vegas. He said he had only owned the Airstream trailer for two weeks.
Utah Highway Patrol trooper Jim Jessop said no citations were issued to either driver.
“It was just one of those accidents,” Jessop said.
The crash led to minor delays for traffic through the area as wreckers removed the vehicles from the roadway.
This report is based on preliminary information provided by witnesses and law enforcement and may not contain the full scope of findings.
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Copyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2018, all rights reserved.
This one section of interstate has always been one of the worst when we travel too and from st george, I don’t know why people need to tailgate when
everyone is going 10-20 miles over the speed limit.
Gotta love it, when some guy in his new trailer is doing 85mph.
Both coming from Cedar… I would’ve gone west to Panaca and south on US 93.
The driver of the Airstream had it for only two weeks (inexperience) and was most likely towing with an insufficient tow vehicle and going too fast. What was described is trailer sway, very common when . Carefully employ the manual lever on the Trailer Brake Controller, then SLOW DOWN.
If you tow, know the weight ratings of your tow vehicle (including GVWR and the axle weight ratings) as well as the SPEED RATING and WEIGHT RATING on your tires – same for your trailer. I’ll give you a hint, most trailer tires are NOT rated for speeds greater than 65, often less. Yes, tires have both SPEED and WEIGHT ratings. Staying inside of your weight ratings and watching your speeds will prevent this sort of thing.
This is all due to inexperience and could have been prevented, the guy even says he only owned the trailer for 2 week. The tow vehicle was way too small for this trailer, while the weight may have been within the acceptable limits on paper it doesn’t count in the physical size of vehicle required. If you don’t have a counterbalance and enough to keep the trailer in line, this is what happens. That trailer probably weighed about 4000lbs and a fully equipped frontier can tow up to 6400lbs on flat ground. With a combo like that, it doesn’t take much for that trailer to sway and things to get out of control! There should really be a course for people to learn how to safely tow a trailer, I see way too many people out there with these unsafe setups and accidents like this seem to happen way too often.
Pulling a good size Airstream trailer with a Nissan Frontier? Ah, no. Without knowing the model of trailer I guess it to be more in the 6,000 lb range, probably more, loaded. You could drive into a Trailer or Boat dealer with a Moped and the salesman will tell you “Sure, you can tow anything with that” Very dangerous.