Brandon Weir’s morning commute in his Bluepeak truck took an unexpected turn one recent Tuesday morning when he came across an accident and stopped to help.
The summit, the point where Interstate 80 crosses the Laramie Mountains between Laramie and Cheyenne, Wyo., sits at 8,640 feet above sea level and is the highest point the road reaches on its trek from California to New Jersey.
The short stretch near the top often sees severe weather with high winds, and regularly closes during the winter months due to hazardous road conditions and accidents.
On Tuesday, Feb. 7, I-80 was mostly clear with some patches of snow and ice as Bluepeak’s Weir and Sam Kuhn neared the summit in the early-morning hours driving their Bluepeak trucks. The Laramie-based installation technicians were headed east to Cheyenne.
As Weir came around the last bend before the top, his eyes settled on an overturned truck resting against the snowbank in the median. He didn’t see the truck lose control and roll, but snow was still settling around it and steam was starting to drift up. The two pulled over and Brandon called 911 immediately.
Weir approached the truck and could see the driver attempting to get out, but the passenger door was stuck. Weir, Kuhn and another passer-by who had stopped combined to tug on the door a few times and pry it open to allow the driver to crawl out of the truck.
After confirming he was okay, Weir invited the driver back to his Bluepeak truck to stay warm while waiting for law enforcement to arrive and Kuhn continued on to Cheyenne. Weir remembered some basic concussion questions from his football days and asked a few of the middle-aged man, as he called his wife to inform her of the accident. Help arrived in 15 minutes and after some thank yous, Weir was back on his way to Cheyenne. Weir said stopping to help along the road is “the Wyoming way” with long distances and few people in between towns.
“At the end of the day, nothing is more important than making sure someone is okay,” he said. “We didn’t know if this guy was alive or hurt or dead. It’s a sense of moral obligation for me. You take care of people. You’re supposed to help people. The whole point of being on this planet is to try and do good things to make the world a slightly better place than it was when we got here.”
Weir’s employer, Bluepeak, launched fiber internet service to residents and businesses in Cheyenne more than a year ago. Bluepeak is slated to launch service to Laramie in the spring. For more information and to sign up for updates, visit mybluepeak.com.
About Bluepeak
Bluepeak is building a faster, more reliable internet without the things that get in the way of great service — like red tape, hidden fees, and slow response times. Offering up to 5 gigabits of speed for residential customers and 10 gigabits for businesses, Bluepeak is a whole new ballgame — from internet to TV, to connecting every device in a home, to powering a business, Bluepeak not only provides the best fiber connections in the communities it serves, but also meets the growing needs for how its customers live. Visit mybluepeak.com to learn more.