A 73-year-old Whiting woman was trapped inside her SUV after it left Route 539, slammed into a utility pole and a wooden fence, and flipped onto its side in Manchester Township Wednesday evening. Emergency crews freed the driver from the wreckage before she was flown by helicopter to a trauma center with numerous injuries.
The woman was identified as Cathy Stone, according to tomsriver.org, which reported that Manchester Township officers responded to the area of Ocean County Route 539 and New Mexico Drive at approximately 5:45 p.m. on Wednesday. A separate account from Daily Voice placed the response time at 5:48 p.m., at the same intersection. News 12 New Jersey reported that officers were called to the scene for a single-vehicle crash.
SUV Found Flipped Onto Its Side
When crews arrived, they found a black, heavily damaged 2022 Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross resting on its side, per the report from tomsriver.org. Investigators believe the SUV had been traveling southbound on Route 539 when it left the roadway to the right, struck the utility pole and fence, and then overturned. News 12 New Jersey similarly reported that investigators believe the vehicle was heading south before it veered off the road.
The impact left Stone trapped inside the overturned vehicle, the outlet reported. Emergency crews worked to extricate her from the wreckage before she was transported by Medevac helicopter to Jersey Shore University Medical Center, according to the same tomsriver.org account.
Driver Listed in Stable Condition
Stone suffered numerous injuries that were not believed to be life-threatening, the report said. She was wearing a seatbelt at the time of the crash, according to Manchester police, and was reported to be in stable condition.
Police said failure to maintain a lane is currently believed to be the primary contributing factor in the crash, though the cause remains under investigation, per tomsriver.org's reporting. No additional details on the ongoing investigation have been released.
A Road With a Troubled History
Wednesday's crash adds to a long record of trouble on Route 539. Ocean County law enforcement responded to 284 crashes along the 38-mile Ocean County stretch of the roadway between January 2013 and May 2015, eleven of them fatal, according to Patch. Manchester accounted for roughly a third of those crashes, the outlet reported.
The trend continued in the years that followed. Jersey Shore Online reported that Manchester logged 67 crashes on County Route 539 in 2017 and 58 in 2018, with speeding and unsafe passing identified as the most prevalent risk factors along the corridor. In 2019, an Ocean County Sheriff's traffic-enforcement program on the roadway produced 674 traffic stops, 287 summonses and 22 criminal charges, the outlet reported.
Officials have previously tried to address the danger. A multiagency initiative announced by then-Ocean County Prosecutor Joseph D. Coronato aimed to educate drivers and raise safety awareness along the 38-mile stretch, according to New Jersey 101.5. A planned $3.4 million project, funded through the Federal Highway Administration's High Risk Rural Road program, was also proposed to make safety upgrades to a 25-mile segment of the route between Little Egg Harbor and Plumsted.
