Illinois Route 120 (locally Elm Street) is a centerpiece of the city of McHenry which many take on their way to school, work, or home every day. The traffic heavy street has its faults, however, beyond the inconvenient left turns and speeds that drastically vary from 50 and to 30 miles per hour. It is also a hub for accidents. Particularly, the intersection of Elm Street/Chapel Hill road in unincorporated McHenry sees an abundance of accidents.
Accidents on Elm Street make big news pretty often in McHenry, with recent examples being the infamous Starbucks crash in January of 2020, when a pickup driver had a medical emergency that resulted in him losing control of his vehicle and crashing into the Elm Street Starbucks.
Additionally, on March 27th last year, an elderly woman was struck and sadly killed on Elm Street and Oak Drive. More recently a drunk driver crashed into a light pole on the intersection of Elm and Green Street this past April and caused serious damage to a building in the process.
To say that accidents are common on Elm Street would be an understatement, but high profile accidents are typically spread out at various intersections and parts of the road. There doesn’t seem to be a specific hot-spot at first glance, but looking deeper it is clear that the intersection of Chapel Hill Road and Elm Street in unincorporated McHenry (near Eastwood Manor and MMS) has a history of danger.
In 2016, a McHenry man named Cainen Reimann and his wife Kaylan were involved in a collision with a tree off of route 120 and near Chapel Hill road, which would result in Cainens death. More recently, this past August two drunk motorcyclists went off the road northbound on Chapel Hill road toward the Elm Street intersection. It resulted in one death and serious injuries to the other driver.
These are only the reported accidents. Many go unreported to support the anonymity of the drivers involved, and typically road accidents are only written about in the media when there is a death or severe damage to a building or structure.
Why accidents are so common in this area could have many reasons. The area is a hot spot for businesses with Riverside Chocolate Factory, a New American Home Improvement store, and both a Shell and Thorntons gas station being placed on the corners of the intersection. This leads to sporadic and sometimes hard to see turning lanes that with reckless drivers can be serious hazards.
Additionally, the Eastbound and Northbound routes of Elm Street and Chapel Hill respectively are curved and have high speed limits, which can lead to drivers overestimating the control they have over their vehicle, (particularly in winter or rainy weather) and for non-attentive drivers, unexpected traffic that they can’t see until it’s right in front of them.
Another other issue is just that: The traffic. Elm Street in large is a combination of highway and residential road, and this causes a lot of stop-and-go traffic, and drastically changing speeds, which can cause further accidents both lethal and non-lethal.
Driving in general can be a dangerous thing, but in this specific area it seems accidents are far more common.