Slip Sliding Away

Winter driving can be very stressful and dangerous even for the most hardened road warrior. This is especially true when the dreaded ice storm hits an area. Combined with inexperienced drivers ice can be more than an inconvenience, it can be deadly. Loss of life and property is never pretty.

Recently I was heading to the "house". House is a trucker colloquialism for going to their domicile terminal or where they park the truck when they do actually go home. First, the rain was light almost a mist really. Then the temperature started to drop, first a couple of degrees and with each mile it became colder and colder yet the mist did not turn to snow. Never a good sign.

I slowed down as I could see I was lacking spray off of my trailer wheels. Spray is a good indication of road conditions. Spray equals a wet road with good to fair traction, no spray is an indicator that you are on traveling on ice and traction is minimal at best. There are many other ways to determine road conditions but, for this discussion I used lack of spray combined with a quickly dropping temperature to automatically slow down.

As I dropped from 62 mph to around 45 mph I was being passed by cars and big trucks that were unconcerned by the rapidly changing road conditions. For anyone unfamiliar with I-80 in Pennsylvania it is a 311 mile winding asphalt ribbon with very few straight level stretches. As I was just cresting a small rise in the road I noticed a Heartland* truck coming to a stop about 1/2 mile ahead. The Werner* that had just passed me was slowing and had put on his 4-way flashers. I let up on the accelerator and was getting prepared to ask on the CB why they were stopping when I saw it. A truck was sitting partly on the shoulder facing the wrong way and his trailer appeared to be flipped upside down.

Once I assessed the situation and realized that we three were the first to appear at an accident I radioed the Werner driver in the left lane not to stop, but to drive ahead of the accident and pull over there. I told him that by blocking the only lane open he was increasing the chance of another vehicle getting involved with the accident. I too pulled ahead of the accident before parking off to the shoulder of the freeway. In addition to allowing traffic to continue to move freely, I wanted to be on the opposite side of the accident in case the driver had not survived. Whenever a death occurs on the freeway the state patrol will often shut the road down for hours until their preliminary investigation is completed. I did not want to be on the wrong side of this accident if the road was going to close.

The Heartland driver realized what we were doing and followed suit. He also called the emergency services. As I approached the truck I saw that the driver had spun 180 degrees and had rolled the truck and trailer over. The trailer was resting on it's roof and was almost flat, the tractor had come to rest upright and badly damaged. At some point in the rollover the roof of the sleeper section of the truck had been ripped off. Most of the driver's belongings were scattered all over the road and embankment. I thought there was no way someone could survive such a horrific rollover and was not looking forward to finding a body. Suddenly, to my relief, a head popped up out of the sleeper area and, looking somewhat dazed, tried to take stock of his situation. I asked if he was hurt, he replied "no, I am good". Then I asked if there was anyone else with him and again he said no. The driver told me he could not get out of the truck. I went to the passenger door and gave it a hard pull and surprisingly it opened, a bit mangled but open none the less. The exposed engine was smoking or steaming, I couldn't tell which, and I noticed a strong odor of diesel. The right side tank was intact but the left tank was leaking fuel at an almost steady stream into the culvert over which the tractor and landed. I wanted the driver and myself out of range of a fire as quickly as possible. Seeing the State Trooper pulling up and parking a safe distance from the smoking carcass of the truck I directed the driver to the Trooper.

Shortly after the State Trooper came onto the scene the Sandy Township Volunteer Rescue showed up and evaluated the situation. They identified the leaking fuel and noticed the trailer had been carrying wet batteries not dry as the driver had stated earlier. The Rescue squad set up for Hazmat containment and clean-up of both the battery acid and the leaking diesel.

As you can see from the photo on the right, the tractor and trailer became separated at some point and ended up about 30 feet from each other. Also, the man to the left of the tractor is the driver of the rig. He was shaken but had no cuts or abrasions that I could see. The piece of debris beside the rear of the truck is what used to be the roof of the sleeper.

In the photo on the right the fully loaded trailer of wet batteries, came to rest on it's roof. The weight of the undercarriage and the act of rolling literally flattened the once 13'-6" high trailer. To the rear of the trailer a stream of battery acid can be seen spreading across the highway.

Here you can see just how far the tractor came to rest after separating from the trailer. The driver of this rig is very, very fortunate that his tractor did not end up under the free rolling trailer. After they became separated each became a formidable force able to destroy just about anything in it's path. A truck such as this one normally grosses around 18,000 lbs and the trailer 15,000 lbs before freight is loaded. With a full load of wet batteries this tractor-trailer combined could have grossed as much as 80,000 lbs. And yet, both the tractor and trailer were destroyed like they were made of tin.

EMS crews can be seen working to contain the battery acid and fuel from spreading down the culvert into the local stream further down the road.

Two hours after stopping to offer assistance to the driver of the destroyed truck I prepared to leave. I was already overdue and I still had 124 miles to go.

The cause of this accident? Speed, traveling too fast for road conditions. Just because the speed limit is 65 mph does not entitle a driver, big rig or car, to drive 65 mph all the time. 65 mph is the limit not the mandatory speed. When conditions warrant, a driver has a responsibility to slow down. If this driver had not been traveling in excess of 50 mph, entirely too fast for the road conditions, he would have saved himself as well as his company a lot of grief if he had just slowed down. The load, truck and trailer were a total loss. His company will end up taking a minimum of $300,000 lost in equipment and freight..

I did not travel more than two miles and sat for 45 minutes in traffic because a dump truck over turned on the freeway. And so it went the rest of the day. Every few miles another accident, a car off the road here a truck jack knifed there and so on. Every accident could be directly attributed to not paying attention and then reacting appropriately to changing road conditions. The drive of 200 miles that would normally take me a little over three hours took me seven hours to complete safely. There were a few times that I was going less than 15 mph and the trailer broke traction. I corrected the slide and used the rumble strip on the shoulder to slow down before applying any brake at all. Once under control I slowed to 10 mph. I felt it was better to be late than never getting to my destination at all. No load, no trip is worth the loss of property and possible injury or worse, loss of life just so I can get to where I'm going a few minutes early.

Once again I have rambled on long enough about nothing in particular. I must go get some sleep as I have to get up in a few hours and drive to someplace I have never been before, have no desire to go there and will probably never go there again. Check in again when I promise I will regale you with even more useless, mindless and tedious dribble than this small glimpse into my psychotic world.

Until that time, let me leave you with an observation my wise old Uncle Buck, rest his soul, left me. "If you're going to walk on thin ice, you might as well dance."**

Have a good day and a safe ride. You'll see me when I see you.
RoadRage

_{* Heartland Express and Werner Enterprises are trucking companies. Both of these drivers were company drivers in company trucks.}

_{** Apologies to Tony Hillerman, author of the Jim Chee mystery novels, as he is the creator of Uncle Buck's parting observation.}