Natural selection
L+ratio bozo stupid.
Fun fact: school buses in the US are legally allowed to ignore posted weight limits on bridges. While this may seem particularly insane, usually on bridges the posted weight limit is not the weight that will make the bridge instantly collapse, it’s the weight that if regularly exceeded by crossing vehicles will cause undue wear and require the bridge to be repaired or replaced sooner than it otherwise would have been. School buses are infrequent enough (and relatively light enough, even despite the child obesity epidemic) that they don’t create a significant problem.
On a wooden bridge like this, though, the same logic does not apply. I sure wouldn’t cross it in my school bus, but the height limit would preclude that anyway.
I was going to say, even if the bus was over the limit on weight for this thing it wouldn’t clear the roof, but then you said that at the end.
Oh, it would clear the roof all right - it just wouldn’t be a covered bridge any more.
School Bus: look at this cool hat I found
Engineers hate this one trick
Or the bridge would still be covered, but your bus wouldn’t…
Well, school bus bodies are a lot stronger than people think (I say this as someone that’s rebuilt one as a skoolie) but so are wooden structures. I’d pay good money to find out whether school bus or covered bridge roof would win in a fight. I think the reality is that they’d both come out of it in pretty bad shape - but the kids would be fine.
reality chiming in:
both would be fucked.
[The signs] are placed along Hurricane Road at the last major intersection before arriving at the bridge crossing. Basically, there’s no way to miss them.
The reporter overestimates most truck drivers’ situational awareness.
Most people are just oblivious. It’s not that they didn’t see the signs most of the time. It’s that they don’t know the height/weight of their vehicle and just assuming, eh it’ll be fine. I’m shocked how many people can’t tell me what year their car is…some can’t even tell me the model. It’s a Toyota something…it’s blue.
I was at a tire shop the other day and somebody gave them the keys and said “it’s a blue Honda Accord”
The tech came back confused and eventually they realized it was a grayish (maybe a tinge of blue) Hyundai Accent.
At least they got the first letters correct, I guess.
My car’s initials as H.A. and the colour is between #00f and #eef.
My car was assigned minivan at birth, but now identifies as a VW beetle with a Porsche engine swap.
That reporter has never heard of http://11foot8.com/
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Every time i see these vids im just sat there thinking “HOW DO YOU MISS ALL THE SIGNS???” its not even just normal signs, it has lights, led text, a big fat orange steel bar, standard high vis signs on both sides.
Just makes it all the more entertaining.
Wait until it happens to you. It almost did to me and I was entirely oblivious, so I can no longer blame them for being idiots.
I was moving to a new city, but I had been there many times. One of the more useful roads was along the River, curving in and out, and under a bunch of low bridges: great fun to drive, plus I was really familiar with it. So, guess what route I naturally took with the moving van. Yup. Did I notice all the “Cars Only” signs? Nope, they had all faded into background noise. Did I notice all the height limits? Nope, not used to looking for those, plus I was busy trying to find my way around an unfamiliar area pre-GPS. I was saved by a buddy whose car I was following, who realized it and got off the road at the last minute. I still didn’t have a clue, but eventually matched up the height of the truck with the height of the bridges, and realized how close I had come to being on the News
The most fun are when the driver approaches slowly, like you can sneak up on it…
“I paid the most money to get the best truck and it can do anything. Ain’t no fuckin’ sign gonna tell me my truck can’t do it!”
I’m not seeing any cops around here
I lived by a historic covered bridge as a kid. The people in the area would have been PISSED if something like this happened. The bridge was originally designed for horses and buggies, so if your vehicle weighed too much, you couldn’t go on it.
So when is the driver getting charged for vandalism and littering?
Need to pay the cost to repair the bridge too
https://www.thedrive.com/news/overweight-ford-f-750-plunges-through-historic-wooden-bridge-in-maine
Repair estimates have not been released, but the owner of the truck company has offered to help pay for the rebuild. The incident itself remains under investigation by local authorities.
The trucking company has already offered to help pay for it. It’s likely covered under their insurance and the driver is almost certainly been fired.
What about the environmental damage of a car filled with gasoline, oil and other toxic materials falling into the river below? I doubt anyone will have to pay for the full cleanup
Law enforcement fines the trucking company, trucking company files insurance claim, trucking company pays.
Hazmat was probably the third for fourth on the scene after police, fire and ambulance and would have put those floating oil absorbers in the river.
Yeah something like this isn’t some wild out of the blue occurance that nobody is prepared for. Any department of transportation of any acceptable competence level has a procedure for catastrophic bridge failure, especially by vehicular overload.
You can’t charge a corpse
There’s some nifty trick here to avoid parking tickets
Was it a NiffTea sponsored bridge, though?
The driver suffered minor injuries but was able to exit the vehicle on his own. Luckily, no one else was hurt, considering the area is popular with swimmers and kayakers.
“The driver suffered minor injuries but was able to exit the vehicle on his own”
The driver suffered minor injuries but was able to exit the vehicle on his own. Luckily, no one else was hurt, considering the area is popular with swimmers and kayakers
but getting into a car accident while kayaking is an interesting bragging right lol
That is in no way related to the question asked. Are you a career politician by chance?
Sorry, I was quoting the article in attempted response to another commenter saying the driver was dead :0
Nice save.
The driver deserves criminal punishment in addition to the punishment of ignoring physics.
Would this be a criminal offense? As much as it’s annoying that his car is so massive, he drove a street legal vehicle in the wrong place. Paying for the damages seems like a sufficient consequence.
He failed to observe a traffic control device. There’s at least a ticket in there somewhere for him.
Perhaps the cost of the damage would add up to something they could try to make felonious
If it’s overweight, it’s not street legal.
It was overweight for the bridge, not the road. It was from a commercial trucking company, so likely a dump truck. The first clue should be that it was a F-750. There are pickup beds for them, but they’re almost always a flatbed or dump bed.
Street-legal, bridge-legal, who gives a shit. The point is, they drove it illegally and should be able to be punished accordingly. The make and model are irrelevant.
Do you think they wont be if not for this internet rage?
Street legal*
*not legal on all streets
Not a lawyer, but I would assume that reckless driving would apply here. If nothing else, he should be liable for the damages financially due to negligence
If the bridge had been just a bit sturdier, it could have been damaged jut to the point where the truck could have passed, but the next person driving over would have fell in and risked their lives.
Are we fat-shaming cars now?
Aren’t we always?
Yes, we are.
I’m pretty sure that bridge is a portal to another world.
Source: the documentary Nos4atu
Haha I know that one. NOS4A2. I quite liked it, much in the vein of stranger things. Also contains a car that should get properly fucked.
Damn. The posted limit on the bridge is 3 tons. The truck empty weighs 4.5 tons and they were hauling a full load of gravel. What an idiot. They better yank the driver’s commercial license because he obviously wasn’t reading any signs.
I used to live near a few covered bridges, and trucks would always be doing shit like this. They’d either be overweight and cause damage to the bridge (though never this bad) or they’d be too tall and drive off with part of the bridge attached.
The term Historic is being used to grab attention, but this is fixable, even it will take until Spring. The article states that it was rebuilt in the 70’s, but the wooden deck has almost certainly been replaced a few times since them.
Historic is also there to point to why the bridge isn’t at fault. Modern bridges can often handle such weights, but historic bridges can’t. Certain parts of the country have reason (aesthetics, historical value, and tourism) to rebuild and restore their historic bridges rather than replace them with modern bridges.
No one managed to get a shot of the truck in the water apparently
So some facts here:
- Commercial truck carrying gravel
- This was a rebuilt bridge, not a historic one
- The owner of the construction company has proactively offered to pay for repairs
- Yes, the driver is am idiot and made a mistake, and is probably going to hear about it for the rest of their lives.
and is probably going to hear about it for the rest of their lives.
As they should. They either ignored the signage and/or were oblivious to the weight they were driving around. Both major safety issues. They should have their license suspended for a bit and potentially banned from a cdl.
This isn’t an “oopsie,” this is negligence.
The couple that were driving the truck died, and thier house was sold to a new family, who they haunted.
BeatleSmoothie! BeatleSmothie! BeatleSmothie!.. It’s not working! Was it soup? BeatleSoup!, nah. Doesn’t sound right. It was a liquid for sure! 😁
It’s BeetleChowder. But I don’t wanna summon BeetleChowder so I won’t say BeetleChowd
Sandworms… You hate 'em, right?
I’m going to see the documentary tomorrow
I hope it’s good. I have a hard time not seeing Wynona Rider as a crazy person now though.
Gravel? Holy shit, that’s poor judgement. How can you be comfortable driving such a big truck over a wooden bridge, then add potentially tons of gravel?
This is the opening plot to Beetlejuice
Tim Burtony soundtrack intensifies.
Is this the plot to beetlejuice 2?
I thought the same, this looks a lot like the place they had the accident in the first movie
These cars aren’t resembling tanks, but are literally tanks! Their size measures up to being one of a tank, their weight one of a tank, and the damage it fucking causes when it rams into a family of four in a small sedan one of a tank.
Imagine the amount they cost tax payers from road repairs alone, enough to build a functioning fast rail network in California
Probably thought the weight limit was a suggestion and not a hard constraint. Yikes
To be “fair”, with how material exhaustion works, it could have totally been fine, as the bridge only would have bent and creaked beneath the guy, and then the next, under-weight-limit car would have fallen in.
Yeah you can destructively overload a structure a number of times before catastrophic failure unless you go way over. It may be internal stress but it can be as far as shearing a bolt or two. But each time you lower the load bearing capacity of the structure, and once that’s begun the structure is on borrowed time and you won’t notice until it’s too late unless you have regular inspections
The careful text-books measure
(Let all who build beware!)
The load, the shock, the pressure
Material can bear.
So, when the buckled girder
Lets down the grinding span,
The blame of loss, or murder,
Is laid upon the man.
Not on the Stuff — the Man!- Rudyard Kipling
The average truck driver doesn’t think rules apply to him.
