Victims in fatal Highway 30 crash identified

UPDATE, NAMES ADDED: The two people who died in a head-on collision early Wednesday morning on Highway 30 in Benton County have now been identified.

Benton County Sheriff Randy Forsyth said a westbound sport-utility vehicle driven by Scott Alan Swallom, 42, of Vinton veered across the center line and collided with an eastbound car driven by Jacquelin Lee T. Daggy, 51, of Belle Plaine around 4:20 a.m.

The accident happened about a mile west of the Highway 218 junction.

Neither person had a passenger.

“Both of the people involved here are fairly local people, so they are familiar with the road,” Forsyth said. ”You could always surmise that maybe one of them fell asleep or reached to do something and just crossed over.”

Truck driver Gordon Hicks, 57, said he came up on the accident and tried to help. He said the front of the SUV was burning, and the man was still inside, so he used his fire extinguisher and water from his cooler to put it out.

“I used everything I had, man,” Hicks said.

Highway 30 was closed in both directions while emergency personnel cleared the wreckage. It reopened just before 7 a.m.

The wrecked car stopped near two white crosses planted in the ditch as a reminder of another fatal crash at the same location. Forsyth said that accident differed slightly, because one of the vehicles involved was leaving a farm driveway.

In 2006, another head-on crash in that area killed a Belle Plaine man. Last week, six people were hurt in a head-on collision about a mile to the west.

“It's always a problem when you go from four-lane to two-lane,” Forsyth sad. ”People are used to driving on the four-lane, especially if they've come a long way on it.”

Plans are in place to convert Highway 30 to four lanes through all of Benton County, but construction won't start for at least six more years. Cathy Cutler, a transportation planner with the Iowa Department of Transportation, said $6 million has been set aside in the 2014 and 2015 budgets to purchase land in the right of way.

The project hasn't made it onto the official transportation improvement program, because it only extends through 2015, but Cutler said the groundwork is already being laid.

“We're doing the planning study right now,” Cutler said.