(Photo: Garet Cobb/Associated Press) – We were admittedly very rough on the 23-year old truck driver that piloted her big rig onto an historic Indiana bridge rated at six tons capacity and destroyed it. We’re not reversing our stance on her actions, her admission that she did not know how much six tons was or how many her truck weighed, but this Associated Press story that was recently published sheds tons of new light on the woman, her situation, and the madness leading up to the wreck followed by the personal and processional disasters after it.
Mary Lambright and her husband Edward had left the Amish faith and the only life they knew a little more than a year before the incident. Financially struggling, they saw trucking as a way to make living and advance their personal situation toward stability and a happier existence. They existed on the kindness of friends and family for a while but when that ran out and odd jobs were not going to cut it, they decided to go into trucking. Mary went to school first and Edward worked. Once Mary was on the road and making a living, Edward was going to go to trucking school and they they were going to be team drivers and essentially live together on the road.
The plan never seemed to work out because of financial troubles and on the day that the Mary drove onto that bridge the wheels were already coming off of their personal lives. The link below has the full story and it is worth a read. Not necessarily because it is designed to make you feel sorry for them but mainly because it is a window into all of the circumstances that led up to the horrible decision Mary made to approach that bridge.
As we believed, the trucking company has now gone out of business. That may have been a financially motivated decision to try and protect themselves from the onslaught of legal issues stemming from one of their rigs taking out a bridge but we’re not sure.
This is a fascinating read. Check it out –
Click for the full story about the girl who killed the historic bridge with a big rig
As Mary is a 23 yr old married woman, can you please refer to her as that and not as a “girl?” Thank you.
Yes. Replace all references to “girl” with “brainless bimbo”.
Why do people like you insist on opening their mouths about stupid crap like this. “As Mary is a 23 yr old married woman, can you please refer to her as that and not as a “girl?” Are you kidding me? this is your focus for the day? You feel good? you changed the world! congrats!
1. In 8th grade I knew what 6 tons was. I also knew what the legal road weight in my state (Ohio) was for Trucks with out a permit. A buddy’s dad was a OTR Truck Driver. So lets take her basic education off the table.
2. If you have been driving a Semi for that long, A driver should know when to just say Stuff it, stop, and figure out a reversing plan. She had her cousin who could have spotted and stopped traffic.
3. If we give free passes to every one that has a personal life blow out before an accident, most people would get a free pass.
4. If she knows Amish skills such as Baking: A good baker will make More then a Trucker. That or maybe she can go back to school and learn Welding,
Stepping out from one way of life into something radically different can involve a lot of adjustment. The “common sense” taught to you by your parents in your old life…something that would have facilitated your success there as a second- or third-plus generation participant…may be of little help to you in your new world where you’re a first-gen pioneer and are essentially starting from scratch on learning what you’ll need to know to fit in. Most of us, even if we were not interested in becoming something like a truck driver, have seen wrecks or had a dad who came home from work talking about one, and we understand there are hazards beyond the obvious and we need to be careful. This couple didn’t have that bit of common sense and even having taken some training were in fact not nearly prepared to be out there operating a 30-ton truck on public roadways. It’s a sad fact that people who grow up in a cloistered society may never fit in to the real, open world if they should choose to leave, and weren’t really done any favors by their parents who started them there. I applaud them their efforts but like was said above, they need to be fixing meals or something.
I still don’t get it. You folks are mad because she screwed up? my god, at 23 if I had collapsed a bridge, that would have been one of those “lessor and included” crimes.
I really don’t get the “she should have known better”…. really? I’m glad Brian published this – she’s a human being who messed up and unless one of you haters hasn’t ever screwed up…. shut the hell up.
I know for an absolute fact that none of the folks who write for this blog haven’t screwed up to far greater degree. Say this “but for the grace of God there go I” and let this poor girl get on with her life.
She screwed up, admitted her mistake, is making restitution and because of those things is far better than most of you.
tyvm
To be clear – it’s just a f**king bridge, we can build another – maybe this time one that can handle the load.
No hate, and yes people make mistakes. She made one when she turned down the wrong road. That was a mistake, any time that things are not going as planned you can call it a mistake and a good time to stop and re-analyze things. Instead, after that she continued on in her chain of decision-making to utterly destroy an expensive piece of public property that was otherwise functioning as advertised, put her life and that of another in severe jeopardy particularly as in her 20-some years of life around water she had not learned to swim, and incidentally wiped out who-knows-how-many years of her employer’s effort in building a trucking company, and he may have a family he’s trying to support too. All things she will never be able to pay for and indeed no one would realistically expect it, that’s just a chance you take when you hire someone to perform a task. Yes but for the grace of God there go many of us…and sometimes we have to just take a little option called “moving to a new town” afterward.
One good thing that can come of it all is, spread the story around so the chances of it happening again are lessened. I posses a house, cars and indeed hands and fingers that I possibly might not now because I once pondered the story of someone else who lost theirs.
,,,And this said, by a guy who’s an experienced expert at making mistakes. They go beyond counting…
So if we publish all the mistakes everyone has ever made; then we won’t have any more mistakes? a bold assertion, my friend.
and by bold I mean that Gail will always have a job reporting the news…. no matter how fastidious they are at broadcasting
Keep in mind that today we are looking at things backward, the family’s background story coming first. The original news was that a truck collapsed a bridge, and it would be a fact that 99% of people who saw that, including the most reasonable among us, would be interested in that as news. At this point two months later the driver is choosing to tell more of her story, and submit her and her husband to a process that will probably ultimately facilitate more understanding and maybe even forgiveness.
Gail doesn’t report the news, she is well behind the scenes.
Maybe we can hire drivers who can handle the load.
Maybe she just needs to go back to the Amish where she doesn’t need to know how much 6 tons is. 🙂
Seriously, there ain’t anyone that hasn’t screwed the pouch now and again. Give the GIRL a break.
Maybe they can find someone that’ll be willing to give them a second chance.
You don’t just “go back to the Amish” and the young lady is clearly devastated at what a small mistake turned into.
Knocking down a bridge is a “small mistake” ? Kinda like the the Black Knight in Monty Python’s ” Holy Grail” shouting ” It’s only a flesh wound ” when he gets his legs lopped off.
I have read the story relating to this and the first thing that comes to mind is – BUILD A BRIDGE and get OVER IT.
I guess that’s what will be happening – literally.
Sounds to me like a real tuff deal all round but shit happens, we have all screwed up shit, maybe not to this extent but hey it is what is. I dare say it wasn’t on purpose.
I didn’t read that any one was killed or even hurt (thank god), unlike some of the other BAD intentional shit that seems to happen every day.
In hindsight maybe she should have thought more about the predicament she found herself in but – what’s done is done.
Maybe the owner of the trucking company is wishing he had some hindsight before putting this young lady in a prime mover and trailer.
Hindsight, if you could bottle/box it and market it would be a HUGE seller.
I quite often see young (real young) guys on the highways in big rigs and quite honestly it worries me. I mean how much experience do you think they have and usually they drive way above their capabilities.
No excuse for this. What if she forgot it took longer to stop an 18 wheeler, and plowed through an intersection killing women and children? Would the warm and fuzzy people still say “it was just an accident, shes human”? She went through truck driving school yet didn’t know what her truck weighed? On top of it being on her BOL papers it should pop up on the digital readout at a weigh station. She was probably caught up in texting whilst driving when she bombed the bridge. Imagine the money it will cost the taxpayers to replace that bridge now the company went under. I also find it hard to believe they were barely making it with both of them being drivers. Totally living beyond their means in this modern world. Swift trucking would hire them both. They dont mind destructive greenhorn drivers.
It’s amazing how many people can’t differentiate between understanding more aspects of a situation and excusing someones actions. Are you that invested in feeling superior?
I can’t believe what some have posted. If in fact a driving school graduated this woman you can absolutely assume weight and tonnage was covered in great detail as was weight limits of roads and bridges and again, not a little but a lot. Every time you get loaded you have to get a scale ticket and figure weight for drive axles, steer axle, and trailer tandems. While the trailer is being loaded this also has to be taken into consideration or you will never make it past the first scale and they are not forgiving and they do hand out big fines for errors. To play the stupid card is not believable at all. Every time a driver of a big truck gets behind the wheel they know that they are responsible for the lives of everyone that are around them, and many or more like most drivers do not make it easy on them. If you can’t devote 100% of your attention to driving don’t get behind the wheel, it’s to dangerous and to use personal maters as an excuse after the fact us unacceptable as well.
There was a book I read by a young man who tried to get out of his Amish family life, just a terrible tale, poor kid had zero skills to adapt in the modern world, heartbreaking really, and I’m not one for excuses.
He basically had to go to other Amish communities as an outsider to even survive. And it didn’t get better for him, the book just ended with him someplace sleeping in a trailer, like an alien from another planet..