Photo by Rhys Moult on Unsplash
This is My Real Life Trucking Accident Conclusion to my story about the worst accident I ever had. It worked for the most part. If I had not started moving he would have hit my tank about middle ways.
That would have more than likely ruptured it. It would have most likely been like a nuclear bomb going off.
Instead, he hit me in the trailer tandems tearing them out from my trailer. He ended up ripping everything off his passenger side of the truck clean back to the sleeper.
The hood, fender, steer axle, fuel tank, windshield and passenger door were all missing.
The small car that was sliding with him ended up sandwiched under my trailers belly. It contained about five or six young girls and they were screaming hysterically. They were fine I suggested to them that they should call their parents. The girls needed to tell them they were okay before they saw this on the news.
They were okay it just shook them up pretty well. My tank was undrivable and I was checking to make sure that it wasn’t leaking. Then I started to check on the driver of the other truck.
But he was not in his truck. I thought for sure he had been thrown out of the truck because the windshield was missing. But he was already out checking on others to make sure they were okay.
All in all, there were 28 vehicles blocking the road. I was number 25, the little car under my tank was 26, the other tractor-trailer was 27. There was a car that ended up hitting him in the back end it was 28. Everybody that was behind us got slowed down and came to a stop thank goodness.
The road was closed for 9 hours while they sorted through all the vehicles it continued to snow too. By the time they got all the vehicles that were in front of me off the hill and bridge it had snowed about seven or eight inches.
My tanker was destroyed but the truck was fine so when it was time to remove me from the bridge. We had to use the entire road and two wreckers and the power from my truck to move the tank.
My Real Life Trucking Accident Conclusion time to offload my tank
So we dragged my tank about two miles down the interstate and off the road into a closed gas station. I went to bed as my company had another truck en route to offload my load into his tank.
This process is illegal and highly dangerous, but it’s only illegal if you’re caught doing it. Because there is not a good way to ground the trucks and trailers connected to one another. Acetone is highly flammable static electricity can set it off.
The other truck and tank finally got on scene and we offload 7,000 gallons out of my tank into his. I stayed overnight. The next day a company came and got the tank and I headed home without a tank.
In all the wrecks with 28 vehicles involved. Only one person got hurt and it was just a cut on a finger. We had the tank repaired like new and I picked it up about two months later.
This accident scared me enough that I no longer was able to drive in the snow. I also no longer wanted to haul hazardous materials.
© 2017 Paul Cox All rights Reserved
Paul Cox Writer 