Physics can be fun and destructive!

[gridlore]

This morning in the section of the Bay Bridge approach known to locals as the MacArthur Maze, a tanker truck went a little too fast, and had an oopsie. Well, actually, he crashed and his tanker full of unleaded exploded.

But that's not the fun part. No, the fun part is he was under the 580/80 connector ramp when his load began to oxidize rapidly, releasing large amounts of heat. Which softened the steel supports of said connector ramp, which meant that gravity soon noticed this big chunk of concrete and asphalt with no viable means of support, reached out, and...







Here's the full story.

The driver? Crawled out of the wreck on his own, hailed a cab, and is now in the hospital with critical but non-life threatening burns.

You cannot begin to imagine how happy I am that my route doesn't come near the Bay Bridge. I see a surge in ridership on BART and the ferries. Right now, they have no estimate on how long this will take to fix, but one official on the radio said "could be a couple of months."

Comments

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

Well, right now we don't know the cause of the accident. But there's a reason truckers refer to smaller vehicles as pinballs. I spend most of my day worrying about what the next moron move is going to be.

If the driver was at fault, his career is over. At the least, the DOT will pull his Federal Carrier permit. He will also lose his tanker and hazardous materials endorsements from his state license along with a long suspension. If his mandatory drug test is possible, he will simply loose all right to drive anything.

Most gas tankers are company owned, and they have insurance to cover this sort of thing. But as part of any negligance suit settlement will include the firing of the driver.

Most people don't appreciate what commerical drivers go through to get the license. To drive a car, you need to read an eye chart. For a truck, you get the chart, color vision test, periphial vision test, depth of vision test and we won't even start on the hearing tests.

I'm going to wait to see what the CHP report says before passing judgement.

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

You said he was going too fast, so I assumed you had seen more reports than I had.