Freeway traffic backed up for miles, for hours, while crews made numerous attempts to move stuck semi truck. / Courtesy photo by Department of Transportation
By Sharyn L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter
CHEHALIS – An over-height semi truck that got stuck at an overpass on Interstate 5 near Toledo leaving one southbound lane blocked yesterday was finally dislodged about 3 o’clock this morning.
The bridge at the Toledo-Vader road offramp near milepost 61 is signed for allowing 14-feet 9-inches of clearance, according to the state Department of Transportation.
The driver indicated his rig was 16-feet tall, DOT spokesperson Bart Treece said.
“He did slow down to about 25 mph to try to sneak by, but that didn’t work,” Treece said.
The truck was hauling a generator base from Centralia to Idaho, he said.
It happened about 2:30 p.m. and by 4:30 p.m., the backup on the freeway was four miles and growing.
Traffic was detoured for bridge inspectors to examine the structure and during attempts to pull the truck out, Treece said.
They let the air out of the tires, but the truck was still lodged there, he said.
They tried pulling it out with two class C tow trucks, but that didn’t work either.
“So we used hydraulic jacks to lift the bridge, had three tow trucks pulling and one loader pushing,” he said.
Treece said that for whatever reason, the pilot car didn’t communicate with the driver.
“If they would have taken that offramp, (and got back on), they would have been just fine,” he said.
The bridge was scraped up, but inspectors aren’t concerned about anything structural, he said.
They’ll return tomorrow to double-check all their information so they can send the operator a bill, he said.
It was the same type of load being hauled last Tuesday by a different truck that hit the Koontz Road overpass on southbound Interstate 5 in Napavine.
That truck was traveling freeway speed however, and the damage to the overpass more serious, according to Treece.
Koontz Road above the freeway remains closed and its opening date still unknown.
“We had to develop a pretty significant repair plan, because the girders were badly damaged,” he said.
Tags: By Sharyn L. Decker, news reporter
Driver must be using that new core mathematics to figure out where he can fit his rig.
me drive real good
Quite obviously, he just didn’t slow down enough – he made a serious error in his height/clearance/speed formula calculation. My figures show it would have been easy to pull a 16′ height load through a 14’9″ hole if he was only doing 4.864 mph!
Stupid 16 feet tall and he wants to sneak through lol
Classic.