The bridge that tears trucks apart

Monday, 30 September 2019

The bridge at the intersection of Gregson Street and Peabody Street in the city of Durham in North Carolina in the USA is famous the world over.

You may never have heard of its location before, but you have probably seen what it has done to the trucks of unsuspecting drivers who venture under it, like the poor sap in the 18-wheeler above.

How, you may ask yourself, does that driver miss the incredibly obvious warning signs and manage to open his truck like a cheap can on the underside of the bridge?

Well, no-one really knows that, but it happens so often that there is even a website dedicated to it.

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11foot8.com was set up by a chap named Jürgen Henn, who works in an office near the bridge and set up a couple of cameras to capture the carnage after he noticed the regularity of trucks eviscerating themselves on the bridge.

How regular? Well, since he set up the cameras in 2008, Henn has posted a startling 147 videos or more than one a month, something he confirms on the website, which states 'On average, about once a month a truck gets visibly damaged at the bridge. However, every day I see trucks that trip the overheight warning lights, stop and turn into the side street.'

The website is named after the official clearance height of the bridge (3.55 metres in metric), although the actual height of the bridge is 11 feet 10.8 inches (3.63 metres), yet still those trucks keep coming.

Apparently the rail bridge was built around 80 years ago, before minimum heights were really an issue. And either raising the bridge or lowering the road are extremely expensive, or simply not practical.

As Henn explains on the website, the road can't the road be lowered because 'it would be prohibitively expensive because a sewer main runs just a few feet below the road bed. That sewer main also dates back about a hundred years and, again, at the time there were no real standards for minimum clearance for railroad underpasses.'

Also, as far as local authorities are concerned, the safety risk of the bridge is minimal: as of January 2018, there have been no deaths and only three minor injuries at the bridge, leading officials to concentrate on more urgent safety issues.

What about raising the bridge?

'Here, too, the question is who would want to pay the millions of dollars to raise the tracks a couple of feet?' Henn writes.

'To accomplish this, the grade of the tracks would have to changed on both sides of the trestle, probably for several miles. That would require rebuilding all trestles in Durham. And (the railroad company) would have to shut down this busy track for months. I don't think they are interested in that idea.'

After all, as he points out the rail company's main imperative is keeping the trains running, so their concern is mainly with reducing the impact of the truck crashes on the structure of the trestle. And they solved that problem by installing the crash beam.

Finally, in the website's FAQ section, the obvious question: are the drivers stupid?

'No idea,' it says ' They certainly seem distracted and the rental truck drivers are also probably inexperienced.'