Fiery Crash Collapses California Freeway
 

Maybe you've already seen this on the news, but OMG

Yeah, I'm guessing it will be a while before I get a seat on BART again. Good thing I'm not on my old commute anymore because my bus used that bit of road and there are no good alternatives.

What I like best about the story is that the driver walked away, called a cab, and got himself to the hospital. What I want to know is how the hell you get a cab driver to pick you up in West Oakland at 4 in the morning with a giant fireball in the background.

No way could that freeway collapse just from the heat of the gasoline fire....I suspect a government conspiracy.

OK, you have me rolling...

Thank goodness the drivers survived, but poor guys. Second degree burns are probably more painful than death. I wish them a low-pain recovery filled with morphine and vicoden.

Good luck to commuters.

One thing I"ve been wondering is:

Can the state (or the fed; who pays for an interstate repair like this?) sue the driver's insurance coverage?

Probably....but who has the kind of coverage that would pay for something like this?.....My coverage max's out at $100,000.....not enough to even pay for the cleanup let alone new construction.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=P0Fi1VcbpAI

I went accross this bridge(well, not this exact bridge but the one that replaced it) durring an ice storm....very scary!

For some reason, I have been seeing a LOT of footage of the Tacoma Narrows bridge in the last couple of months. The explanation on the failure of the bridge was surprisingly: aerodynamics. The bridge actually acted like an airplane wing with the heavy winds.

Is that "Galloping Gertie"? I hate watching that footage of the guy who gets out of his car and leaves his dog in it and the bridge breaks.

So weird to be reminded that for most of the country that footage is not just part of the popular consciousness.

The Puget Sound area has a proud tradition of things falling down.

Omg, I remember the Husky Stadium thing, Alex. My mom was friends with Paul Lydig, the builder, and that was not a good time. A few years prior, a major mall project he was working on was blown away by freak high-winds.

We've had a little drama played out here this past week regarding this bridge:
Stuck in Spokane.

I've sine it a billion times and I'm not a local *shrug*

I have a feeling the driver is going to be hurting for a while. They are saying now that he was going faster than the posted speed limit.

Everybody goes through there faster than the posted speed limit unless traffic is bad.

Saw it in person this morning. They've already cleaned up a bit but it is still an impressive sight (and site).

That's the case in a lot of places in California. The way I look at it, for all the time we spend stuck in traffic, we have to go 90 MPH the rest of the time to get an overall average of 65 MPH.

It's also an unusually low speed limit (50 mph). Its a long arcing stretch on a slope. Kind of fun to take at speed in a car. A lot more fun in a tanker truck, I imagine.

My new word for the day...........Hydrodemolition.

We went across that bridge on our SoNapa Tour. How bizarre to arrive home to this news !

much better to be reading it from there than experiencing it first hand I would think.

Every driver in NoCal exceeds the speed limit. And if you don't join them, they get all pissy at you. I remember when the 580/680 interchange was mid-construction back in the 90's, and there was this one spot where the road did an S-curve while dipping down to go beneath an underpass. If you didn't take that bit at the same speed as you had the previous straight stretches, you were an impediment to the rest of the traffic. (Scared me to death, I'll tell you, and I impeded traffic many times there!)

Northern California does NOT have an exclusive on this - you see it all the time in Southern California.

And on the I-5 in the middle of the night too.

one would think that a reasonable exception to this 'nothing exceeds like excess' rule would be the one whose a$$ is on the line driving around with 10,000 gallons of explosives a mere foot or two behind him.

aparrently not.

Yeah, but when you drive 10,000 gallons around every day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year, you probably get over that "oh my god" feeling after a while.

Cross-dress. Go ahead and try it. Be sure to show a little leg. Them cabbies love that sorta thing.

I think it was even in an Alpine or Magnavox commercial a number of years back.

But did you cosine it? That's what I want to know.

Me, I'm working on a tangent.

I just want to say for the record, I was nowhere near that bridge at the time of the accident, and damn - I missed a 200ft. tall FIREBALL!?!?

My thoughts exactly :p

And the next time we tangent a thread I want someone to arctangent it back on topic.

Learned about the cab calling. He walked more than a mile through West Oakland streets before coming across a cab driver getting gas and convincing talking him into a trip to the hospital. He tried to pay at the hospital but the driver refused.

So, let's take that as a counter stereotype thing: You can walk a mile through West Oakland at 4 a.m. in the morning without coming to harm.

Just make sure you've already had some of your flesh burned off in a fiery accident

I think that has to be the single most amazing thing about the story. Screw the fact that a gasoline truck accident MELTED a freeway.

Although I remember when Richard Prior worked his famous cocaine accident into his routine: "When you are on fire, people get out of your way!"

Ha! Definitely.

I'm nowhere near Oakland but damn that would have been impressive.

Yes, so far the evidence is that it works only if you come pre-harmed.

I'm thinking this poor fella is going to be the most hated person in that area right now to all the comuters.

Well, maybe second only to President Bush.....

Well, the local news tore into him last night.

Turns out he has two arrests in the '70s and a possession conviction 10 years ago.

With all appropriate rage they tore heaven and earth asunder to find out how this malignant blight on society could possibly have slipped through the cracks and been issued a truck driving license as well as a hazmat endorsement.

The answer?

The law doesn't prohibit it and he passed all the tests.

How can such a failure of the bureaucracy be allowed to stand?!

The next step, of course, will be the blacked out, voice-altered interviews with truckers talking about how little they sleep and how much speed they do to make their runs on time.

Then . . . nothing.

At any rate, if the response to the Loma Prieta quake is any indication, this should all be fixed in 17, 18 years.

This guy was a local route driver so I imagine he gets normal sleep. KCBS this morning had a most inane segment this morning: "the Maze collapse has raised questions about the state of our infrastructure around the state." And then was a blowjob to some guy advocating more bond measures like were passed last fall.

Regardless of the merits of such bond measures I fail to see how this event raises questions about the state of our infrastructure and how more highway expansion projects would have helped. I'm pretty sure that if you ignite a full tanker trunk underneath just about any stretch of road in this state that you'll experience structural failures.

Strangler, on the other hand if Loma Prieta is an indication they should be able to replace a collapsed segment of road in a month (as they did with the Bay Bridge). Though it took about 11 years to replace the entire Cypress Viaduct.

As of this morning's commute the site is pretty well cleaned up. If it weren't for all the scorch marks that branch of road would just look like another off ramp to nowhere (there are already a couple of those in the maze).

And after the 94 Northridge earthquake, they were able to get collapsed overpasses of the I-10 freeway (a VERY busy artery in Southern California) opened within a few weeks.

Have the opened up the lower part - where the collapsed part fell ON to?

No, they had to wait until it was cleaned up to get in and start doing structural evaluations. They don't know if the fire weakened that part or not.

I read a post elsewhere that indicated one of the barriers to quick repair is ability to obtain the required structural steel. Steel is in high demand due in large part to the massive amounts of development in China right now. There are long lead times for orders, so the situation is different now than it was in 1989 for Loma Prieta.

Um... so he made some mistakes in the past. The 70's- that was 30 years ago... a lot can change in 30 years. Drug possession was still 10 years ago- that's a long time.

More important I think is that he passed all the tests and presumably they test drivers for drugs once in a while, right? Doing his job is more useful a gauge than what he did in the past. He could have learned better since then.

That just made me giggle. I can imagine the experiments. And the surprise when you conclude, hey, burning that much fuel under an overpass really does melt things!

Hummm, perhaps you have an alibi, but sources tell me that a certain bear of foreign nationality was sighted in the vicinity shortly before the "accident".

God, what has our society become? Shall we all be branded with scarlet letters in perpetuity once we've slipped up one time?

You know... the Nazis kept excellent records too...

(oops, little Godwinian slip there)

Vegemite is not flammable.

:p

I don't think it was the vegemite that was flaming, dear ;)

Doveryay, no proveryay.

I say he deserved the second, third or whatever chance but I'd sure as heck be dragging his butt in for drug and alcohol tests right about now.

But you might want to test him before roasting him alive in the press. We had a big crane collapse here and killed a guy and the press dug into the crane operator's rather unsavory past and splashed it all about with the usual mock horror. Turns out he had nothing to do with why it collapsed, but nobody really cared about that.

David used to be a mechanic for a small division of World Oil, working on tanker trucks. Any time they would get word that they had to drug test someone they would use him, instead of one of the drivers. That way they knew they were testing someone who would pass the test. The company still has a reputation of hiring just about anyone who can get a Class A with Hazmat clearance, no matter what their past is like. A good chunk of their drivers had been fired from other companies for having too many accidents.

The truth is out there.