(no subject)

[randomness]

From http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/01/nyregion/01truck.html:

"The truck was 13 feet 6 inches high. The tunnel has a height limit of 13 feet. Six inches can make a big difference.

Mr. Cantu drove the entire 1.5 miles of the tunnel from Weehawken, N.J., to Manhattan, tearing his way under the Hudson River in the tunnel’s center tube and peeling back the roof of his tractor-trailer as if it were a tin can."

Inches Too Tall for Tunnel, Rig Plies It Anyway

A Texas driver who failed to heed height warnings on the New Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel early Thursday reached Manhattan to find that his truck's top had peeled back. The tunnel also suffered damage.

By THOMAS J. LUECK
Published: June 1, 2007

It was just six inches.

That was what made the difference at 4:40 a.m. yesterday as Gilberto Cantu, a truck driver from Texas, approached the New Jersey entrance of the Lincoln Tunnel in his big rig, loaded with bathtubs, toilets and plumbing fixtures. The truck was 13 feet 6 inches high. The tunnel has a height limit of 13 feet. Six inches can make a big difference.

Mr. Cantu drove the entire 1.5 miles of the tunnel from Weehawken, N.J., to Manhattan, tearing his way under the Hudson River in the tunnel’s center tube and peeling back the roof of his tractor-trailer as if it were a tin can. No one was injured, but an undetermined number of decorative tunnel ceiling tiles were ripped off.

It was unclear why Mr. Cantu did not heed warnings from flashing signs and a loudspeaker in New Jersey, said Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the tunnel. “There were enough bells and whistles going off that this should not have happened,” Mr. Coleman said. “He told the officers he didn’t know where he was going.”

Mr. Coleman said that accidents of this kind were almost always averted. When a too-tall vehicle enters the toll plaza, an electronic sensor is tripped, several stoplights are activated and police officers at the plaza use a loudspeaker to order the driver to stop.

Mr. Coleman said trucks were turned back for exceeding the height limit about once a week. And on the rare occasions when trucks have entered and scraped the tunnel’s ceiling, their drivers have invariably stopped, he said, and the police have employed a height-reducing technique of letting air out of the trucks’ tires so they could be backed out.

Roy Guzman, the safety director of U.S.A. Logistics Carriers of McAllen, Tex., Mr. Cantu’s employer, said in a telephone interview that “it was just a bad call” by Mr. Cantu. “He misjudged the height of the tunnel, and once he was inside it he didn’t realize the damage he was doing.”

Mr. Cantu, of Edinburg, Tex., declined to comment. He was issued nine misdemeanor moving violations, including reckless driving, failure to obey a traffic signal and failure to obey an officer’s command.

The Lincoln Tunnel’s center tube — one of three — was closed until 6:15 a.m., delaying by 15 minutes the beginning of express bus service for the morning rush. But Mr. Coleman said there was little disruption of traffic because of the early hour.

Mr. Guzman said Mr. Cantu had driven for U.S.A. Logistics for four years and had a spotless safety record. “We were very, very surprised this happened to him,” Mr. Guzman said. But he said there would be consequences.

“This is going to cost us, and it’s going to cost him,” he said. Whether that means Mr. Cantu will lose his job “has been discussed, but we have to wait and see until we have a talk with him,” Mr. Guzman added.
Note: I have been trying to post this since the morning the item came out.

Comments

Wow.

[avicado.livejournal.com]

Just...

Wow.

That's got to take the cake for Shear Stupidity In A Moving Vehicle.

Thank you. You just made my day. &:)

Yes, I meant to type 'shear'.

[eac.livejournal.com]

This is what you might call a really bad day...

[donnad.livejournal.com]

You would think the guy might have felt a little drag on the truck or maybe heard something, it had to have made a lot of noise.

sheesh!

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

bedfull_o_books thinks the driver was too tired to be driving.

[drwex]

I agree with that, esp. given the hour.

Reminds me of those fun little incidents with U-Haul trucks and Mem Drive...

[dianec42.livejournal.com]

Don't forget the incident with the Wienermobile (that might have been Storrow, but close enough).

[contrariety.livejournal.com]

I just want to know how he managed to drive the whole tunnel like that without stopping. It's not like peeling your roof off at high speed would be a subtle and difficult to notice event.

[dianec42.livejournal.com]

Even at 4:40 AM, that might not have been at high speed. But still, that's damned impressive!

[mr-skullhead.livejournal.com]

Wow, what a coincidence. When I was parking in one of the UT garages this morning, I ended up a few cars behind a minivan with a plastic cargo holder strapped to their roof, which was about 1" too tall. The line of cars was moving slowly, all following the minivan as it went BAM into each concrete ceiling support.

I ended up parking next to them and their now beat-up cargo container. On my way out, a woman walked past the minivan owners and said "That just made my morning -- it's refreshing to see somebody do something like that and have it not be me."

that so wants to be in a movie

[kissoflife.livejournal.com]

I'm with that woman-- and somehow, that picture is totally _priceless_ and curiously invigorating. I am sad for the driver. Lo, I am distraught for all the commuters whose mornings were formerly enriched by those aesthetic 'decorated' tunnel ceilings(?!). hee hee!
I have such a taste for injuryless disaster carnage. I truly revel it it.

[rosminah.livejournal.com]

Gilberto Cantu must have been inspired by James Mosqueda, the man who crashed a gasoline tanker into a highway overpass and melted the steel structure in SF with the resulting fireball. Both happened in the wee hours of the morning, too, so there were few injuries, bless.