Ortega Highway Crash Victim Wins $2 Million

California must pay more than $2 million to a Lake Elsinore man injured in a crash on state-owned Ortega Highway, an Orange County Superior Court jury ruled Monday, four years to the day after the crash.

The area of winding highway where Philip Jones crashed, about eight miles east of San Juan Capistrano, was substandard and dangerous, his attorney said after the verdict. He contended that the California Transportation Department was aware of the hazards, based on its own traffic studies, and did not repair them.

Attorney Larry Danielson, who represented Caltrans, could not be reached for comment Monday.

Jones was driving home from work on the afternoon of Dec. 16, 1981, traveling east on Ortega Highway, when he rounded a curve and saw a red pickup truck heading toward him in the same lane, according to Dave Graf, Jones’ attorney.

Jones’ car nicked the truck before veering onto the eight-foot-wide dirt shoulder. He steered back onto the highway when the 150-foot shoulder ran out. But in doing so, Graf said, Jones’ car yawed. When the tire struck the edge of the paved road where erosion had left a two-inch drop to the shoulder, Jones’ car turned broadside in the highway, plunged down an embankment and came to rest in a creek bed, Graf said. The driver of the red truck fled the scene.

Graf said Caltrans maintenance manuals at the time stipulated that the dirt shoulders of rural highways be shored up and made level with the road when they were below the surface of the road by 1 1/2 inches.

Cites Caltrans Study

“The state had run a study on the area about three miles west of where our accident happened and had declared that portion of the highway to be substandard and deficient because of potholes and drop-offs and general deterioration of the roadway,” Graf said. “That study was done right before our accident.”

That stretch of the 1930s-built highway was 10 feet wide at the time of the accident; it has since been widened to 12 feet, which is Caltrans’ standard for two-lane rural highways, Graf said.

Graf also had argued that the road at the time of the accident was too narrow and that the 150-foot shoulder ended too abruptly.

In 1984, 175 accidents occurred on Ortega Highway between Interstate 5 in Orange County and Grand Avenue in Riverside County, according to the California Highway Patrol. Those accidents resulted in 150 injuries and 12 deaths.

Jones, 31, who is married and has two children, sustained several broken bones, including fractures of the wrist and knees. The former carpenter had sought about $3 million in damages, Graf said.