Well, since I live so far "out in the country" you wouldn't even believe it, I'll throw in my two cents on this. Rural driving has a few extra considerations that urban drivers never need to bother with. In the first place: deer.
When I was young, the main fun of driving on these blacktop county roads was maxxing out your speedometer. But the deer population has skyrocketed now. (I think hunters kill something like 800,000 in my state every single year.) I creep along the ten miles into town at <35mph, when I used to go 85. About every third or fourth trip, I stop and watch the deer running across the road in front of me. (My idiot friend, who lives a few miles away on the same road as my house, is too impatient to drive that slowly--she's hit seven deer. Her insurance premiums are large.)
Also, combines are so rarely on the actual road--maybe 1% of the time they're operating. It's a huge hassle since the machines are usually wider than a single lane, so everyone is inconvenienced and annoyed when they get backed up behind a large piece of farming equipment. The equipment driver has to keep finding spots to pull over and let people go around him, and when there's a mailbox or something on the shoulder, he has to pull out and block both lanes. Suffice it to say, no one drives their equipment any farther on the roads than they absolutely have to. And moving equipment at night from one farm to another is never done. The only reason I can think of would be a huge storm front moving in and leaving only a few hours to try to harvest and save whatever you can, by headlight. Plus, farmers are going to have every inch of the limited storage space filled with tools, hoses, duct tape, etc. They'd laugh at the suggestion they should take up room with flares.
Maybe everyone who drives on a public thoroughfare should carry flares in the event of a total electrical failure where you're stranded without lights or blinkers--but I don't have any flares in my car and I don't think most people do.
Anyway, it seems to me the combine driver got caught in an EXTREMELY rare set of circumstances, to be broken down, at night, on the road, without any hazard blinkers or tail lights. While Chris was both incredibly reckless and foolish . . . well, although I guess that's why kids do it--because it's fun to scare yourself silly by taking risks.
But I can't really assign liability 50/50 on the situation. A measure of culpability to the combine operator, but mainly on the guy zooming along with his headlights off, with a car full of people shriek-laughing that they can't see what's in front of them.
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