Driving a truck is not an easy job. I can say that because I actually spent time as a truck driver and while most of my work was in the city, the idea of spending time on the highway was not totally foreign either. That’s why I have some sympathy for the guy driving this rig who managed to get himself on the highway with the dump bed of his trailer at full extension. Things were going OK for him right up to the point where he encountered a road sign that spanned across the top of the roadway for its entire width. That’s why things came to a violent and abrupt stop…literally. While I never did anything this over the top, when driving a beverage truck I did manage to get onto the highway with one of the side bay doors open and that made for a pretty good show. Here’s the thing. When you are driving professionally you really cannot afford to space out for any amount of time and that is hard to do. You also cannot afford to lose your concentration because of a shitty boss, something happening at home, or whatever other outside forces are playing hell with your day. I think every driver in the world knows the feeling of “being behind” and “trying to catch up”.
When you start to try and rush and make up time, things like this happen. This guy may have gotten stuck at a job side and made a run for it to try and get back on track for the day, completely overlooking the fact that the bed was up. Maybe he bumped a lever and didn’t notice the bed rising. Who knows what happened but I do know that he violated some pretty basic rules of being a professional driver. The biggest? He never looked at his mirrors. Had he at least given a cursory check he would have noticed something was amiss. Instead he was rolling at a good clip down the highway and than instantly wasn’t. If that guy was not belted in he may have gone through the windshield. For real.
It looks to me like the guy in the little white pickup you’ll see was trying to catch the guy and warn him but he ran out of time. That guy has some stones because there was no much time to get the word out. Even if he had caught the driver it was likely too late. Lastly, how about the strength of that sign? You have seen them all over the place. The big galvanized steel poles and beefy base structure that mounts it all. Yes it folds up but it really captures the truck while giving its life.
This looks like it happened in the middle east. We can’t imagine the trouble this driver was in once the dust settled. Wow.
Just a dumb fuck… A dumb UNEMPLOYED fuck. We’re safer without him.
How can you drive around with the dump box up? That dufus needs some time behind bars. It’s morons like that who make it hell for the rest of us. As someone with a CDL, and who employs CDL drivers, I have mountains of red tape to handle, and ton of hoops to jump thru just to comply with the whims of the hand wringing, “what if this happens, what if that happens” nanny state bureaucrats. And then there is the idiot who can’t remember something as simple as lowering his dump, who gives those people justification for their existence.
Bit of stretch for anyone to consider an equipment failure though huh? These boxes are hydraulically controlled. Spools do stick and linkages sometimes get bound up allowing pressure and flow to extend (in this case) or retract a cylinder.
Do we really think this guy left a pit or job site, got up to highway speed, dodged other signs only to hit this one?
That is a very good point, and I did consider it as well. I’ve had the PTO or the valve stick before, and had to go under the truck with a pry bar to move it.
The bed could have very well raised while he was driving. But still the drivers fault. For the bed to raise, the PTO has to be engaged. And the valve has to be set to raise. It is 2 completely separate switches/air cylinders. They aren’t both going to malfunction simultaneously. When you get ready to go down the road, you make sure the PTO is disengaged. When you switch it on or off, you can hear the pump whine or not. And you make sure the valve is in “lower” , never “raise”. So even if he lowered the bed, flipped the switch to disengage the PTO, and the PTO stuck engaged, and he didn’t hear it because of a noisy environment, so he’s driving down the road with the PTO engaged, how is the valve going to move to “raise”? (remember, if he did lower it at the job site, the switch would be in “lower”) And anyone who is not legally blind can see the end dump in the mirrors.
Either he was on dope, (most likely) or an idiot, or had no clue how to operate an end dump or drive a truck, or all 3.
I have heard of this happening before in our area, The guy was tearing down power wires and phone wires by the score. He just kept going down the road obliviously leaving a trail of devastation until he hit a bridge. He was found to be on pot.