The attenuator did its job and it wasn’t enough. At about 5:17 a.m. on Sept. 25, an eastbound tractor-trailer struck a parked truck-mounted attenuator in an Interstate 10 work zone near Intake Boulevard in Blythe, Calif., then hit a pickup and a water truck, according to the California Highway Patrol. Three construction workers were struck during that sequence and killed.
The Riverside County Coroner’s Office identified them as Christopher Benavidez Guatemala, 27, and Alfonso Vega Torres, 50, both of Coachella, and Francisco Morales Mendoza, 39, of Tonopah, Ariz. The 44-year-old truck driver, from Redlands, was taken to Desert Regional Medical Center with severe head and leg injuries. The CHP says alcohol and drugs weren’t believed to be factors. It hasn’t released the truck’s speed, and the cause is still under investigation.
The I-10 work zone and the Caltrans job
The crash happened inside the limits of Caltrans’ I-10 Blythe Pavement Rehabilitation, a $241 million program covering 88 lane miles of concrete pavement plus ramps, shoulders, about 11,950 feet of new guardrail and ADA work between postmiles 134.0 and 156.5. Caltrans lists the job as running 24 hours a day, Monday through Friday. ENR reports that Fisher Sand & Gravel Co., doing business as Southwest Asphalt Paving, is prime on the $232.23 million construction contract, which agency data shows as 88% finished with a Dec. 4 estimated completion.
Who employed the three men is still unsettled in the public record. Palm Springs station KESQ reported they worked for Fisher Industries as a subcontractor on the project. ENR says it hasn’t been established whether they worked for Fisher, a subcontractor or someone else, or whether the crew and vehicles were on the Caltrans job at all. Nobody has published where the workers stood relative to the attenuator.
What truck-mounted attenuators can’t do
A TMA is built to absorb an errant vehicle’s energy and protect the people ahead of it. It doesn’t stop a loaded tractor-trailer from carrying on into whatever’s beyond the shadow zone, and a pre-dawn hour on a rural interstate is about as bad a setup as the data describes. ENR noted that nearly half of highway contractors surveyed by the Associated General Contractors of America this year said the devices had improved their work-zone safety performance. That’s a real benefit. It’s also a reminder that the attenuator is the last layer, not the plan.
Federal numbers put Blythe in a pattern. FHWA’s 2026 work zone fact sheet, built on NHTSA’s 2024 crash file, counts 850 work-zone deaths in 2024, down from 905 in 2023. More than half of fatal work-zone crashes that year happened at night, large trucks or buses were involved in nearly a third, and nearly 170 pedestrians and cyclists, workers included, were killed.
Questions for night paving crews
For anyone running night or early-morning lane closures on a high-speed corridor, the questions are practical. How far is the TMA from the active crew, and is the roll-ahead distance sized for heavy trucks at posted speed? Is anyone on foot between the attenuator and the work vehicle? Exchange covered a similar struck-by on Wisconsin’s I-41 expansion in August, and the lessons haven’t changed much.
ENR’s report carries the contract detail. The job is 88% done, with about ten weeks left on the schedule.