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On Thursday, Jan. 28, the most recent example of a too-tall 18-wheel truck being shredded by a low bridge happened in Westborough.
The city’s East Main Street railroad bridge is notorious for tearing the roofs off of semis trying to squeak by.
“I drove close to that bridge every day for 3 years,” said Vanessa Saez on a photo posted by the Westborough Police to Facebook of a TT truck stuck under the bridge. “There are signs up and down that road warning drivers. They are big and if you miss them that means you were not paying attention.”
Today, bridges are required to be at least 13-feet and 6-inches, according to Trains in the Valley. Many of the big-rig-destroying bridges are in the 11-foot range.
Westborough’s truck-eating bridge isn’t alone in its ravenous hunger for large vehicles.
Northampton has a truck-eating bridge in downtown, the Bridge Street bridge. From January 2020 through now, Northampton Police have responded to about 10 incidents of trucks being stuck under the bridge.
There are also low, “truck-eating” bridges that regularly trap vehicles in other Central and Western Massachusetts locations including
- Worcester (the Cambridge Street overpass),
- Monson (the bridge at the Bliss and Bridge streets intersection),
- Southborough,
- Clinton,
- Pittsfield (For Hill Avenue)
- Holyoke (at the Main and Lyman streets intersection),
- and Leominster (Lawrence Street).
WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING?
Just about every time a truck gets wedged under one of these bridges, the local police respond to help free the vehicle and assess the damage. Sometimes the driver is cited for negligence.
The crashes typically don’t cause much damage to the bridges, or the drivers, but they can bust up a truck and cause hours of traffic delays. Truck drivers are supposed to know the height of their vehicles and road officials are supposed to present clear signage of bridge height.
A lot of effort has gone into trying to stop these types of crashes before they happen, but nothing has seemed to be 100-percent effective.
Some attempts to stop trucks before they get stuck include adding rumble strips to the roadway leading up to the bridge and painting the bridge’s height on the road.
In New York, one community used electronic beams to communicate the distance between the truck’s top and the bridge to the driver from a mile away, according to an editorial analysis in the Daily Gazette.
Other suggestions to stop trucks include adding chains to the bridges so that the truck will hit them and hopefully stop before getting wedged under the bridge, and banning trucks from low-bridge roadways, Boston News25 reported.
Massachusetts has a five-year program to update small bridges across the state, but the criteria is restrictive. The bridges that can apply for renovation grants cannot be owned federally, privately, it has to be on a list of Massachusetts Department of Transportiaotn bridges that are between 10 and 20 feet high, and be structurally deficient.
Meanwhile, the Northampton Bridge Street bridge has gnawed on two trucks this January.
“I’m 62 years old and this has been happening as long as I can remember,” said Mark Whalen on the Northampton Police Facebook page.
We know there are even more truck-eating bridges in Central and Western Massachusetts as well as the Berkshires than what we listed in the article. Add the low bridges with a taste for vehicles that you know about in the comments.
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