May 1, 2007: Melted freeway

[Undertoad]

Via Spluch comes this sfgate.com story about a gasoline tanker's misadventure near Oakland, CA. Seems the gent was traveling a bit fast and overturned. The thing is, if you do that to a gas tanker, and the gas ignites:



It may just be hot enough to melt all the metal in the structure of an overpass.

The single-vehicle crash occurred on the lower roadway when the tanker, loaded with 8,600 gallons of unleaded gasoline and heading from a refinery in Benicia to a gas station on Hegenberger Road in Oakland, hit a guardrail at 3:41 a.m.

Engineers said the green steel frame of the I-580 overpass and the bolts holding the frame together began to melt and bend in the intense heat -- and that movement pulled the roadbed off its supports.

The driver had enough sense to know he was hurt and hailed a taxi to get off the scene and to a hospital:

Mosqueda, an employee of Sabek Transportation in San Francisco for 10 months, got out of the truck on his own after it overturned and hailed a taxi that took him to Kaiser Hospital in Oakland, witnesses and police said.

He has been transferred to the burn unit at St. Francis Hospital in San Francisco, where his father said he was "doing OK" this afternoon, having sustained burns on his face, neck and hands. The family expected Mosqueda to remain hospitalalized two or three more days.

It's not so bad. If you had a good four-wheel drive you could still use it.