Truckers discuss how driver ended up in oversize load predicament

Truck drivers are torn over the exact reason behind an oversize load incident in central Texas on Monday evening. 

A semi truck hauling an oversize load attempted to drive beneath an overpass with a 16 foot clearance on November 11th in Bryan, Texas. The trucker realized that the load would not fit before the load hit the bridge and was able to stop before any damage was done to the load or roadway. 

As a result of the incident, traffic was backed up in the northbound lanes of Earl Rudder Freeway at the Southwest Parkway overpass for about an hour as police blocked the roadway, redirected traffic, and got the tractor trailer off of the freeway, reported KBTX.

“Police were half a mile back diverting traffic to the off ramp to get around him but there were a few that were already past the exit that had no choice but to proceed,” described one trucker, who saw the incident go down. 

The driver who passed the incident as it was happening brought it to the popular r/Truckers reddit community for a discussion on how exactly something like this could happen. 

“Wanted to have a discussion about this!” the post reads.

“With oversized loads you have a dedicated route on your paperwork. He also had his lead vehicle for clearance checks. So how the f**k did they get where there’s no appropriate clearance? Are they off route? Y’all think it’s the driver or did the permit have the wrong route?”

“Maybe he was supposed to ramp over, or maybe the bridge isn’t labeled correctly in the state’s permitting database, or maybe he just needs to down the airbags. Maybe he’s a cowboy and ran off route, or without permits. Could be a bunch of reasons, but causing lots of traffic and not hitting a bridge is a million times better than hitting a bridge and causing even more traffic,” suggested one. 

“Looks like the road has recently been repaved. Likely that’s the issue,” added another. 

“Heavy hauler here. Could be any number of things,” started another. “Could be an issue with the route survey, the route, the load being mis-measured, a bridge being mis-marked, etc.

I’ve ran loads that were 15’6 under bridges that our route survey said was 17′, but my highpole escort’s pole hit (pole is always set 6″ above the load). Thats why the high pole is there, like I just mentioned the highpole is always set 6″ above the load height, so it’s actually pretty common for a pole to hit, and the driver has to creep up to the bridge and visually verify fitment, or even stop traffic completely to measure the bridge if it looks to low. Chances are that’s what’s happening here. Unfortunately there’s a lot of bad pilot companies that will do a route survey from a computer and just measure bridge heights using Google maps, when they’re suppose to go out and physically drive a route.”

The roadway was cleared by about 6 p.m. No information about whether or not the driver was cited has been released.