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UPDATE: But wait, there’s more…additional video below the fold. All copyright Jürgen Henn – http://11foot8.com.
I love it — this video captures the fun all of us who work in the Brightleaf Square buildings in downtown Durham get to hear at least once a month — trucks that are too tall careening down Gregson Street and slamming into the railroad overpass. Someone in the building actually set up a camera to capture the insanity and compiled a “best of” tape. You can see them all here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/yo…
I’ve actually only seen it happen live a couple of times, but I can clearly hear it from my office since I have a window and face that direction. The last time I recall it happening I was getting a cup of tea across the street at Alivia’s and was talking to the person behind the counter and we heard the familiar “BOOM!” We turned around and kept on talking, lol.
The scary part is that up until a few years ago, the trucks slammed directly into the bridge/overpass. Since this surely placed the trains at risk, they set up steel beams just before the bridge so the dumbasses could slam into that. And what is ridiculous is that there is a big height sign on the beam (11′ 8″) and not long ago they added flashing lights — and these drivers still keep crashing into it.Here’s another view of the railroad bridge:
I also forgot to add that my colleagues and I have many a tale about cars getting into accidents at and around this intersection. It’s cursed. In this particular video, rubberneckers at one of the truck accidents bite it.
“Rough day at Gregson and Peabody – first one car crashes into the utility pole at the train trestle, then rubberneckers rear-end each other. The cops show up after 5 Minutes, a fire truck and ambulance a bit later. It did not look like anyone was seriously injured.”
“This truck did not go fast enough to make it all the way through, so it got stuck under the railroad trestle. It took almost 2 hours and a heavy duty tow truck to get it out.”
Hat tip, Bull City Rising.
31 Comments
Ann ArborWow. There’s a railroad overpass in my former Ann Arbor neighborhood where this used to happen regularly, too. I was fortunate to witness it once, and it almost always seemed like the trucks were rentals with non-regular truck drivers. Those tops would just be peeled back like a kipper-tin top.
When I was young…there was a railroad bridge in town that trucks always got stuck under. We were sitting at a ice cream stand when a truck loaded with chickens went under the bridge.
In those days (back in the late fifties or early sixties) they brought chickens to market in cages stacked on flat bed trucks, when you drove behind a chicken truck it looked liked it was snowing.
Any how, this chicken truck tried to go under the overpass and the top layers of chickens got peeled off like those trucks in the video. There was feathers and chickens everywhere running around in various states of distress (to put it mildly). As a ten year old boy back then, I thought it was the neatest thing.
So there are signsI saw this video on FriendFeed last week and had asked if there weren’t any signs, but no one knew where it was. Glad to have some contect.
Yeah,the truck drivers are dips. But has the city considered putting a dip in the road there to lower it? Obviously, the signs for disaster are unmistakable but people keep fucking it up. Haven’t we learned anything from the Bush years?
Oak Park, ILThe CTA Lake St. El runs on an embankment, with overpasses at most streets. About every other month, a truck would manage to wedge itself under one of them. Despite the highly visible signage. Thankfully, the speed limit is 30 mph, and there are stop signs or signals about 30 – 50 ft. from each approach to the underpasses, so these usually happen in slow motion.
One year, for a parade down one of these streets, a local group hired a London-style double-decker bus as its entry.
Someone clearly was not thinking the whole thing through. The bus had to go 5 miles out of its way to get around the underpass, thereby missing the rest of the parade.
We have some big egg farmsaround central Maine; same “snowing” effect when the trucks bring in new loads of chickens along the highways. Couldn’t figure it out the first time I saw it, until we pulled up alongside the truck at a red light.
This happens occasionallyon the Maine turnpike; one overpass had to be closed because of the damage a few years ago.
Bunny slaughterI used to work in a building (the Kinko’s Inc. corporate office in Ventura, CA) that had a wooded clearing behind it. The building’s windows were mirrored, so animals (and people) couldn’t see in.
Groups of cute little bunnies would gather in the clearing and if you stood and watched long enough, a hawk would swoop down and grab a bunny.
I saw this happen several times. The rest of the bunnies would kind of scatter, but they would just return to what they were doing after one of their little siblings had been taken away.
Several people actually asked to be moved from their offices because they couldn’t handle nature’s violence.
One time, I heard my female boss screaming and went to investigate. A man who was working on the grounds had decided to urinate against the side of the building — oblivious to the fact that the mirrored wall he was peeing on was actually windows with hundreds of people behind them. The guy had his penis out and was peeing right in front of us.
We all watched as the building manager went outside and scolded the man. It was hilarious.
Working in a mirrored building can be fun. Anyone else have similar experiences?
some of them look like they could be moving trucks, driven by inexperienced driversthe moving-truck companies i’ve dealt with during moves over the years have never stressed the importance of watching for overhead clearances.
Almost happened to me once- did you notice how many of them are rental trucks ?
When I moved to Boston with a big U Haul I rented an apartment but didn’t know the city, and the only way I knew to get to my new appartment was the main highway (Storrow Drive).
So I ignred the “No Trucks” sign and headed for the apartment and just as I headed under the first overpast I saw the sign and hit the brakes.
Had to back up on a major highway to take an exit, stopped at the first place I saw to get directions.
It was a Ryder Rent-a-Truck place and above the counter they had a row of photos of trucks with their roofs ripped off – I came within inches.
Was he a Republican?Scratch that- obviously not, if you could see his willy.
It’s weird this seems to happenso often at railraod crossings. I guess regular highways are built up higher?Anyway, my truck-peeling story comes from one viaduct in Chicago where the clearance was pretty tight to begin with. Then they repaved the street. A little bit higher than spec. And didn't change the clearance sign. Oops.
Failblog is calling you…
there is a restaurant on the beach in malibuwith mirrored windows. when i lived in the area, there was a constant parade of people combing their hair and popping zits. appetizing views for the dining guests!
yesKinda, yes. In 1986 at a Bob Evans in Zanesville, Ohio. I was eating Sunday lunch with my girlfriend and some very elderly man stepped out of his car in the lot parked right by the window where we were seated, unzipped, peed onto the asphalt next to his car, zipped back up, and got back in his car. The door blocked our direct view of his penis (TYG) but it was pretty clear what he was doing.
SecondedThis stuff needs to be in the world’s biggest collection of fail outside of the Republican National Convention.
I guess I’m confusedWhat are the truck drivers supposed to do? Why wasn’t the bridge built higher? Seems like a driving hazard to everyone involved and should be dealt with by the city.
Don’t be so sure!After all, those Repugs do love putting it where it shouldn’t be.
Truckers should
Obey the traffic signs.
Find an alternate route.
Attempt to proceed through v e r y slowly, and if it is just an inch or so, you might make it.
At the first sign of getting stuck, stop and let air out of your tires (only works if you were going v e r y slowly).
Back in the early 20th century, when most of these railroad spans were built in the cities, the commercial trucks weren’t anywhere near as tall.
I would agree……since most of them seem to be rental trucks. I know I would probably be guilty of making the mistake if I were driving one since my normal car is a small VW. I would probably ignore the signs because I’m not used to them applying to me.
I would think also that if there are so many accidents at this one place and they don’t seem to be decreasing that the city would just chalk it up to old-fashioned, unstoppable human error and change the clearance some how.
I’ve always wondered what a truck does when it realizes it’s too tall. Especially on a busy highway. Still…it’s funny to watch.
Cheap easy solution…Mount a laser an inch below the maximum safe height and when the beam is interrupted, it could flash a very bright red stop light perhaps with a siren. It could even pop up a tire-slasher in the roadway, it would be better to lose all your tires than to destroy your entire truck.
It would be cheaper for the insurance industry if they would install devices like that than paying out a never-ending series of claims.
sort of similarLuckily I didn’t really look, but one time when I was in college, I was in a study area in the basement of my dorm. I heard what sounded like water being poured on the window outside, and I started to turn around. Then I heard a guy outside say loudly to his friend, “Shit! Chick seen me pissing on the window!” and he quickly stopped. His friend asked him, “What did she do?”, and he said, “Nothing, she just went back to her studying.” They quickly left after that.
Last time I rode in a truck like thoseThey had a label inside the cab (above the windshield) that listed the height of the truck.
Dena
Can’t really do anything about the overpass height …Often times, bridges in inner cities that we would today consider “low clearances” — like this 11’8″ example Pam brings up — were built many decades ago, when trucks weren’t nearly as tall as they are today. A typical 1930s truck, for example, wasn’t even a tractor-trailer combination; it was what we would today call a “straight truck,” with an overall length of less than 30 feet and a height of probably 11 feet or less.
There are a couple reasons nothing can be done today, especially if the low clearance in question is a rail overpass. Due to their overall weight, often into the millions of pounds, trains can’t handle grades very well; even 2%, or 1 in 50, is considered a very steep grade for a train. To raise the overpass by two feet, to 13’8″, would require an extremely costly and environmentally damaging re-grade and rebuild of almost a quarter-mile of track — and that’s for one overpass.
The road can’t be dropped either, because sewer infrastructure was put in decades ago with the level of the road at that time in mind. Water and sewage will only flow downhill, and again, you’re looking at tearing up miles of sewer piping in order to solve one low clearance problem. Even if you do that, you run the risk of raw sewage flooding the road every time it rains hard. Go to YouTube and look up Minneapolis I-35 sewer flood, and you’ll see a video of what I’m talking about.
See my reply to “Wade, MD” above [n/t]
PreciselyIt’s almost always some kind of “straight truck” (i.e., one unit, not a tractor-trailer), whether a moving truck or a rental unit. Typically these are trucks that never leave the city, and many of them have a low enough GVWR to not require the driver to hold a CDL.
There’s a particularly notorious truck-eating bridge in Davenport, IA, on Brady St (northbound U.S. 61) a few blocks north of the Mississippi River. That one is known to get a few 13’6″ over-the-road tractor-trailers here and there, because it’s on a major through route running from the Twin Cities to New Orleans, but even it eats mostly locally-operated straight trucks.
Pam loves it????How old is Pam, five years old? Loving trucks endangering railroad bridges, While I hope noone gets hurt, she thinks that funny. Her point of view on that is like that of a five year old. can’t believe this is from a grown woman, Just plain sick!
Much more of a caseof Pam shaking her head in utter disbelief at the repeated stupidity of human beings.
Similar to how I shake my head and mutter “fucking idiots” whenever anyone decides to floor their vehicle the second they round my corner (a marked 35 mph zone) and I hear the police sirens, as they pop out from their hiding spot. It’s a case of either be amused or pissed at the morons.
The roads are supposed to be “milled” before repaving because of the bridge height problemIf the roads are never scalped down (milled is the correct term) by machimes that ripped away old asphalt before repaving, guess what?? You are going to keep building up the pavement ever higher and higher and keep creating sources of giddy kidlike amusement for Pam and other “five year olds” who loves to see trucks hitting railroad bridges.
It not that all the trucks are too high, it just that:
A you don’t keep on repaving (and thus keep building the pavement higher and higher thus endangering the more moderately high trucks) without milling down the old road surface
B YOU PUT UP CLEARANCE WARNING SIGNS ON THE HIGHWAYS, BRIDGES, RAILROAD BRIDGES AND TUNNELS AND YOU DIVERT UNSUITABLE TRUCK TRAFFIC ONTO A DETOUR FOR TRUCKS IF NEED BE, YOU DON’T ALLOW UNSUITABLE TRUCK TRAFFIC THROUGH TUNNELS, BRIDGES THAT ARE A ON THE LOW SIDE ETC.
C You fine the living daylights out of truck companies whose drivers are stupid and don’t pay attention to any and all posted in plain sight signs that state clearance measurements in feet and inches.
are you nuts?It’s called tongue-in-cheek humor. Clearly you’re not a regular reader.
how do you know…That A, B, and C weren’t done? Did you call the railroad company or the City of Durham?
I’ve actually seen streets being milled (another infamous bridge is at 9th and Main), so I call BS on that.
Why can’t you accept that inexperienced, unprepared drivers just don’t pay attention? At some point, it is ridiculous to hear it happen so regularly, given all the warnings.