Injuries Reported in Amish Buggy Crash (Pittsylvania County, Virginia)

Details are sparse, but there are reports of an Amish buggy crash in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, resulting in injuries to people involved – presumably to the Amish, as is nearly always the case in such crashes. From WSET:

PITTSYLVANIA COUNTY, Va. (WSET) — An Amish buggy crashed in Pittsylvania County Tuesday morning, according to state police.

According to the Virginia State Police, the crash occurred at 11:00 a.m. on Alan Creek Road.

State police say there were injuries, but the extent and how many of people injured are unknown.

That’s about the extent of information released at this time. There is no information here on the other vehicle presumably involved – or, truth be told, if there was even another vehicle involved.

It’s most likely that there was a motor vehicle involved as well, but there exists the possibility of a single-vehicle accident, I suppose. The language (“Amish buggy crashes”) is a bit odd and vague.

An Amish buggy travels the backroads in Pittsylvania County, VA

Pittsylvania County has three separate Amish communities – but all of them small size, the smallest being not much more than a dozen residents.

I happened to visit one of them, the settlement at Chatham, some years back. That is a New Order Amish community. This accident appears to have happened closest to the community at Gretna.

I’ll update this story with more when it’s available.

Pittsylvania County is home to three separate, small Amish settlements

Eyes on Virginia’s Amish Buggy Safety

Virginia of course has really been in the spotlight for buggy safety lately. A series of car-buggy crashes in recent years, some of them fatal, have drawn lawmakers’ attention as pressure has arisen to take action to increase safety.

Ralph Berrier Jr. summarized some of the more major incidents in a February article for Cardinal News:

As more Amish families have moved into rural communities in Central and Southern Virginia in the past decade, the number of crashes that involve horse-drawn buggies and motor vehicles has increased, according to local law enforcement agencies.

In 2021, eight Amish children were orphaned after a Toyota Tundra rear-ended the family’s carriage, a wreck that killed both parents and injured all the children. That accident happened barely a half-mile from where the little girl was killed last year.

A 2019 crash in Buckingham County took the life of an Amish mother and injured four children. A year earlier, a wreck on U.S. 15 in Buckingham County killed a horse and injured four Amish people. Numerous other wrecks between buggies and vehicles have occurred near Farmville.

Part of this is a function of Virginia’s growing Amish population. While the overall Amish population remains relatively low, the state is up to 16 Amish communities.

That means buggies in more areas where people are not used to sharing the road with horse-drawn traffic, for one.

In recent years, Amish buggies have become more and more common throughout the state

A previous attempt at legislating more safety features on the state’s buggies failed earlier this year, as noted in the same article:

A bill introduced by Virginia Sen. Mark Peake, R-Lynchburg, that would have built upon existing law and increased the number of safety features and lights on Amish buggies failed during this year’s General Assembly session.

The bill was left in the state senate’s Transportation Committee after some lawmakers said that they wanted more input from the Amish communities that would bear most of the impacts of the bill, including the possible infringement upon the group’s religious freedoms.

Legislation of course won’t necessarily solve the problem, though it could help some. In Virginia as elsewhere, driver behavior on the roads is often the main culprit.

That said, there are no details on this latest accident in Pittsylvania County, so I don’t mean to imply that was the case here. Stay tuned for more details if and when available.