A truck carrying a load that made it too high to clear an overpass crashed in Langley, causing major delays for drivers on Highway 1 Monday afternoon.
Traveling eastbound and pulling a boom lifter, commonly called a “cherry picker,” the truck crashed into the Glover Road overpass around 1:30 p.m.
Damage to the flyover itself appeared to be minimal, but the impact displaced the load and traffic was reduced to one lane and backed up all the way to Surrey.
Many on social media have pointed out that this seems to be a recurring problem. Just last week, traffic on Highway 1 in Surrey came to a standstill for hours after a similar incident closed several lanes.
The Department for Transport confirmed on Twitter that Commercial Vehicle Safety and Enforcement teams had been dispatched. According to this publication, this is the eighth time in the past 12 months that a lift truck has collided with an overhead bridge in the Lower Mainland.
“In the coming weeks, we will be publishing a list of BC carriers that have been canceled because it involves serious safety violations,” the tweet said.
A truck carrying a cherry picker crashed into an overpass on Highway 1 on Monday, July 18, 2022, causing major delays.
The move is called “a good first step” by Dave Earle, president and CEO of the British Columbia Trucking Association. In an email to CTV News, he says what the association would like to see is the release of incident reports and investigations that detail the specifics of each collision.
Some of the questions Earle says he would like answered are whether permits were issued to transport oversized equipment and whether all regulations were followed – including requirements for properly securing loads.
“The results are obvious; the reasons are not so many,” he wrote. “We need to know what happened to figure out the next steps.”
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