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Wife of truck driver in bridge collapse says husband has 'impeccable' record

My point, is that the driver is responsible. In my situation, my boss is going to want me to haul an unlawful oversize load. I can't get on the road, something go wrong, then say my boss made me do it. Why? Becsuse the driver is responsible. Soon as I say yes, I assume 100% of the tesponsibility for anything that goes wrong.
You are held responsible for the maintenance of every bridge you cross? Every road you drive on? So if you have a permit to drive over a certain road with an overweight road, but because that road wasn't properly maintained by the city/county, your oversize load causes the road to give way and wash out....you think that's your fault?

I'm beginning to truly understand why truckers are so ruff around the edges.
 
I've been looking at a couple trucker forums and their general opinion is that the pilot car was to close and either didn't have time to radio back a clearance problem, or there was a problem with the poll which didn't signal a clearance problem at all.

If the pilot car didn't have time to alert the driver, the driver was following to close.
 
My point, is that the driver is responsible. In my situation, my boss is going to want me to haul an unlawful oversize load. I can't get on the road, something go wrong, then say my boss made me do it. Why? Becsuse the driver is responsible. Soon as I say yes, I assume 100% of the tesponsibility for anything that goes wrong.

I know in the refinery ive seen safety watches take the burn when someone else was definately responsable. They pull a random guy out of the crowd and say, "Tag you are safety watch!" Then a guy using a scissor lift or manbasket proceedes to do whatever the hell he wants with it and never listen to the safety. Instead of shutting the job down and creating a HUGE stink and wasting man hours for maybe hundreds of people they just go with it. Operator then recklessly pops a high pressure steam pipe (lucky its not boiling hot crude or something) and points his finger at the safety guy. Safety guy tells the truth and says "He wouldnt listen to me and was doing whatever he wanted" and the corporate slavedogs who make decisions locally use that as the final and only important cause.

Thats just a personal story of my roommate who was in the same industry as me though and 1 of the reasons why he got fired from 1 company we both worked for.

They also love to roll **** downhill to preserve company resource. AKA if a freshly hired assistant gets fired for doing a crappy safety job then the higher paid technician who pulls the company much, much more money then the company loses less.

At least the story makes more sense going southbound.

Dude could have always just stopped though if it was a right of way problem. When cars go into a 1 car each way tunnel they dont rush in at the last second. You stop traffic if you have to and never pass or even think about right of way issues. 1 lane dedicated to this guy is essentially a tunnel. He should have been in the proper lane a mile ahead of time at least.
 
If the pilot car didn't have time to alert the driver, the driver was following to close.
I agree with you there.

I fully understand and agree with the driver having final authority and therefore final responsibility with what happens to his load. Everything up to and including making contact with the bridge, the buck stops with the driver.

What I do not fault the driver for is the bridge collapsing after being struck, because of the facts of this specific situation. It would be one thing if we had a driver with a questionable safety record who took a few short cuts and struck a perfectly sound bridge. But that's not what happened. We have a driver with an "impeccable" record who took every precaution but still struck an old worn out rusted over bridge.

The measure of the driver's fault is the damage to his load, the damage of the piece of the bridge he struck, and the resulting insurance rate increases and blemish on his record.

The driver is not at fault for the collapse because if the bridge had been properly maintained it would not have collapsed.
 
I agree with you there.

I fully understand and agree with the driver having final authority and therefore final responsibility with what happens to his load. Everything up to and including making contact with the bridge, the buck stops with the driver.

What I do not fault the driver for is the bridge collapsing after being struck, because of the facts of this specific situation. It would be one thing if we had a driver with a questionable safety record who took a few short cuts and struck a perfectly sound bridge. But that's not what happened. We have a driver with an "impeccable" record who took every precaution but still struck an old worn out rusted over bridge.

The measure of the driver's fault is the damage to his load, the damage of the piece of the bridge he struck, and the resulting insurance rate increases and blemish on his record.

The driver is not at fault for the collapse because if the bridge had been properly maintained it would not have collapsed.
If the permit issuer told him "You must be in this lane to cross" and he wasnt then its pretty much 100% the drivers fault. If the permit issuer was lazy and assumed the driver would know, never telling him then it would be the permit issuers fault.

95% of my experiences with permit issuers is you put the paper in their face and say "Ima' be doing *this*" and they pretend to scan down the whole thing and look for any personal messages then sign it and give you an incredulous look if you dont get out of their face so they can go back to playing facebook games.
 
I know in the refinery ive seen safety watches take the burn when someone else was definately responsable. They pull a random guy out of the crowd and say, "Tag you are safety watch!" Then a guy using a scissor lift or manbasket proceedes to do whatever the hell he wants with it and never listen to the safety. Instead of shutting the job down and creating a HUGE stink and wasting man hours for maybe hundreds of people they just go with it. Operator then recklessly pops a high pressure steam pipe (lucky its not boiling hot crude or something) and points his finger at the safety guy. Safety guy tells the truth and says "He wouldnt listen to me and was doing whatever he wanted" and the corporate slavedogs who make decisions locally use that as the final and only important cause.

Thats just a personal story of my roommate who was in the same industry as me though and 1 of the reasons why he got fired from 1 company we both worked for.

They also love to roll **** downhill to preserve company resource. AKA if a freshly hired assistant gets fired for doing a crappy safety job then the higher paid technician who pulls the company much, much more money then the company loses less.

At least the story makes more sense going southbound.

Dude could have always just stopped though if it was a right of way problem. When cars go into a 1 car each way tunnel they dont rush in at the last second. You stop traffic if you have to and never pass or even think about right of way issues. 1 lane dedicated to this guy is essentially a tunnel. He should have been in the proper lane a mile ahead of time at least.
Wow that's exactly how it works in the military, too. PVT Snuffy is randomly selected to be the fall guy for the Sergeant should anything go wrong. A whipping boy.
 
If the permit issuer told him "You must be in this lane to cross" and he wasnt then its pretty much 100% the drivers fault. If the permit issuer was lazy and assumed the driver would know, never telling him then it would be the permit issuers fault.

95% of my experiences with permit issuers is you put the paper in their face and say "Im be doing *this*" and they pretend to scan down the whole thing and look for any personal messages then sign it and give you an incredulous look if you dont get out of their face so they can go back to playing facebook games.
I don't see how any part of the permit or permitting process could ever place responsibility of bridge maintenance on the driver.

Damit Jim I'm a truck driver not a Structural Engineer!

That kinda makes me want to become a Civil Engineer, though. If anything ever goes wrong and I totally drop the ball on maintaining any structure for years and years, I can just blame a trucker.
 
I don't see how any part of the permit or permitting process could ever place responsibility of bridge maintenance on the driver.

Damit Jim I'm a truck driver not a Structural Engineer!

That kinda makes me want to become a Civil Engineer, though. If anything ever goes wrong and I totally drop the ball on maintaining any structure for years and years, I can just blame a trucker.
It wasnt maintenance it was faulty design.
 
It wasnt maintenance it was faulty design.

Oh well that's certainly the trucker's fault. He should have known back in the 50s that there was a problem and forced them to make a change, even if he was still in diapers and only spoke 3 words that's no excuse!

We need to ban abortion and give Zygotes rights because a good number of them are going to grow up to be truck drivers and will be held responsible for how a bridge is designed today. We need to make sure all pregnant women view every single blue print for every single bridge and monitor the fetus for it's input.
 
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Oh well that's certainly the trucker's fault. He should have known back in the 50s that there was a problem and forced them to make a change, even if he was still in diapers and only spoke 3 words that's no excuse!

If you know you have to drive into a 1 lane tunnel youd get into that lane plenty well in time wouldnt you? Its not like he was some random dude driving a car that just accidentally hit some side beam. He was a guy that needed a permit for clearance and wasnt in the rigth lane until he took a whole bridge section out. I doubt he even knew what as going on until he heard the SCREEEEEECH across half the bridge section. If he didnt have the hindsight to get into the 1 correct line at least a mile ahead of time chances are it was a herp derp moment.

Its the fault of the driver for not being in the correct place and the permit issuer for even taking the chance on this bridge.
 
If you know you have to drive into a 1 lane tunnel youd get into that lane plenty well in time wouldnt you?
I fault the driver for striking the tunnel.

I do not fault the driver when the tunnel then collapses. I fault the city for not properly maintaining the tunnel.
 
This thread reminds me of this gif:

Thanks+Obama_a1a11e_4547198.gif
 
Pretty much every airplane crash in the US gets a Pilot Error thrown in----Well this crash wouldn't have happened if the Captain had maintained control of his aircraft after both wings fell off and a meteor took off his tail section. It was partially his fault 265 people died---Same thing is going on here.......
 
Not saying you're wrong, but I didn't see that part....I thought it was near the end of the span also...You could be right though...Still doesn't make you correct that it is 100% the drivers fault.
I never said others didn't contribute to the problem. If the lead car made a mistake, it is still the truck driver responsibility in the end. That's why I asked questions like "if the lead car drives off a cliff, is the truck suppose to follow?"

The confusion of the bridge may be that there was some remark that the driver made it across before it collapsed. He made it across the span before it collapsed. Not the bridge. It's easy to tell by the images.

See this image:

AP-bridge_w500.jpg


Look at any map and you'll see those other two bridges are to the east of this one. All reports have the drive going south.
 
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A trucker cannot be responsible for the condition of a bridge, that it falls when struck.
Really?

If the bridge was solid enough not to give with the momentum of the drivers solid steel load, what would have happened then?

How much heavier and costly would it have meen?

Would it need to be made of unobtanium?
 
That's just not true. The bridge fell because it wasn't maintained. Trucks hit bridges all the time, they don't fall.
Really. Just where is you link saying it wasn't maintained. That isn't what a "sufficiency rating" is. I don't recall seeing anything that said it was poorly maintained.

I have seen articles saying the bridge has been struck many times, and never had damage. The difference is, the truck had a rather solid steel load that struck the bridge. Not a corner of an aluminum sheet metal trailer.

Sufficiency Rating

The bridge sufficiency is a method of evaluating highway bridge data by calculating four separate factors to obtain a numeric value which is indicative of bridge sufficiency to remain in service. The result of this method is a percentage in which 100 percent would represent a entirely sufficient bridge and zero percent would represent an entirely insufficient or deficient bridge.

Sufficiency Rating is essentially an overall rating of a bridge's fitness for the duty that it performs based on factors derived from over 20 NBI data fields, including fields that describe its Structural Evaluation, Functional Obsolescence, and its essentiality to the public. A low Sufficiency Rating may be due to structural defects, narrow lanes, low vertical clearance, or any of many possible issues.
 
I've been looking at a couple trucker forums and their general opinion is that the pilot car was to close and either didn't have time to radio back a clearance problem, or there was a problem with the poll which didn't signal a clearance problem at all.
WTF...

Would you, as a driver, pretend you didn't know the low point of this bridge was 12' 6" while the corner of your load is 15' 9"?
 
Wow...

Recent photo, and link attached to photo:



Looks like it will be open soon.
 
I fault the driver for striking the tunnel.

I do not fault the driver when the tunnel then collapses. I fault the city for not properly maintaining the tunnel.
Really?

Aren't drivers aware of this:

A “fracture critical” bridge is defined by the FHWA as a steel member in tension, or with a tension element, whose failure would probably cause a portion of or the entire bridge to collapse.

Fracture critical bridges, of which there are a total of about 18,000 throughout the U.S., lack redundancy, which means that in the event of a steel member’s failure there is no path for the transfer of the weight being supported by that member to hold up the bridge. Therefore, failure occurs quickly, as reflected in the video that captured the collapse of the I-35W Bridge in Minnesota.
 
Wow...

Recent photo, and link attached to photo:



Looks like it will be open soon.
WOW! They said it would take over a year. I hope they plan on replacing each section of it over time and adding the structure bracing to the sides or bottom of it instead of overhead.
 
You are held responsible for the maintenance of every bridge you cross? Every road you drive on? So if you have a permit to drive over a certain road with an overweight road, but because that road wasn't properly maintained by the city/county, your oversize load causes the road to give way and wash out....you think that's your fault?

I'm beginning to truly understand why truckers are so ruff around the edges.

How many times did that bridge get hit before he got there? There's no way he was the first.
 
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