It’s been a year since Annya Palsitt died at a highway intersection in rural Alberta. On July 23, 2025, she was driving home to the family farm near Mundare, about 80 kilometres northeast of Edmonton, when she was killed after a semi-trailer hit her as she was crossing Highway 16 on Highway 855. She was 17. Palsitt had graduated from high school a month earlier and was soon to move to Camrose to attend university with the goal of becoming a teacher. “She had spark. She was confident. She was imaginative. There are so many words,” her father, Bernie, told CTV News Edmonton on Friday. “She was just so great.” Her death prompted calls for an overpass to be built at the intersection, a move that has the support of the town’s mayor and that has spurred a campaign petitioning the province for one. Bernie said in the week before his daughter was killed, someone else died in a crash at the intersection and that there were two close calls as well. He said the province is “supposed to be doing environmental stuff and checks and surveying and everything, and I haven’t seen anything happen here yet in a year’s time. That’s why I need to bring more awareness to it to try and get a little bit more flame under the fire.” Today, a large sign stands at the intersection for Bernie’s campaign: Project Annya. There are two letters on its website supporters can sign, one that will be sent to the area MLA and another to Devin Dreeshen, Alberta’s minister of transportation. Bernie said he spoke to Dreeshen in December about a future overpass. “His words were, ‘This project is getting over the finish line,’” he recalled Dreeshen saying. Bernie says the Project Annya sign will stay at the intersection until work begins on the new overpass. A spokesperson for the ministry told CTV News Edmonton that representatives from it have met with the family twice and that “work is underway.” “We are currently in the early stages of delivering a new overpass at this location,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “We remain committed to making this intersection safer.” With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Amanda Anderson
