A truck driver in Dayton, Ohio had an extremely violent wake-up call during their morning drive on Wednesday. They were eastbound on US-35 when their truck’s bed collided with an overpass. The structure wasn’t exceptionally low to the roadway beneath. The dump truck’s bed was raised. According to WHIO, The incident was reported to local emergency services, but it wasn’t confirmed if anyone was injured in the crash.
Dashcam footage of the crash was shared with the TV station by a driver who happened to be on the highway behind the dump truck. One would hope that the video shed some light on how the truck bed was raised, but it just made it look worse. The vehicle was just cruising down the roadway with the industrial equivalent of leaving a cup of coffee on your roof. While split coffee doesn’t hurt anyone except your morning productivity, a dump truck’s bed could easily damage anything it collided with. The overpass seems to escape without severe damage, and I wouldn’t want to be the person responsible for covering the damage to the dump truck.
Over 15,000 low-clearance bridges are stuck per year on average, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. State departments of transportation have to budget for preventing these kinds of collisions and evaluating damage when they do happen. Bridge girders tend to be damaged after getting hit repeatedly by trucks. There have been rare cases when collisions even caused bridges to collapse after damaging the structure’s piers. However, very few agencies regularly prepare for a raised dump truck bed to plow into an overpass.