Two people were killed Friday morning in a one-vehicle accident on a Jefferson County road slated for safety improvements.

Stephanie S. Collins, 42, Lawrence, and Michael W. Meyer, 79, Winchester, were dead at the scene on Wellman Road, a much-traveled thoroughfare north of Lawrence that leads to the Jefferson County communities of Oskaloosa and McLouth.

Collins was driving a 2000 Chevrolet pickup south on Wellman Road. The truck edged off the west side of the road, according to a Kansas Highway Patrol report. Collins overcorrected, swerved across the road and landed in the roadway’s opposite ditch, where the truck struck a concrete box culvert. Neither Collins nor Meyer was wearing a seat belt.

The accident happened about 600 feet north of Midland Junction, where Wellman Road intersects with 46th Street. Wellman Road is notorious for its lack of shoulders and precarious drop-offs. Between 1998 and 2002, there were 109 accidents, yielding 35 injuries. None were fatal.

Collins was driving Meyer to a doctor’s appointment at Lawrence Memorial Hospital, said Meyer’s longtime friend, Bill Manville, Winchester. Meyer had been suffering from a severe case of diabetes, Manville said.

Manville identified Meyer at the scene and notified his family. Manville didn’t know Collins. No other details about her were available late Friday.

Last April, the Kansas Department of Transportation allotted nearly $1.3 million to a project to improve safety conditions that would add gravel shoulders to a 5.8-mile stretch of the road.

“If you drop off the shoulder, there’s no recovery zone,” Ron Karn, road and bridge superintendent for Jefferson County, said in April 2003.

Karn said last year that the project was expected to start this spring and finish by November of this year. So far, construction on the road hasn’t begun.

6News video: Two die in Jefferson County accident