Photos courtesy St. Albans Fire Department
POINT PLEASANT, W.Va. — A tractor-trailer driver was amazingly uninjured after the cab of his 18-wheeler went over the side of a bridge on U.S. Route 35 in Mason County early Tuesday morning. He was in the dangling cab for five hours before being successfully rescued.
Point Pleasant Fire Department Chief Jeremy Bryant said they’ve had other wrecks at the bridge that crosses Sixteen Mile Road and those other times the vehicles went completely over the bridge but this time it was just the cab and that presented challenges.
“We tried to use a ladder truck to try and get to him that way, we tried to do it from the other lane and we tried to do it from below but there was no way of getting it there and so we ended up calling a technical rescue team, basically repel down and remove the patient from the tractor trailer,” Bryant told MetroNews.
A large tow truck was used to tie off the cab to keep in place and the technical rescue squad tied off to a ladder truck and were lowered to the cab which was suspended about 90 feet about the Sixteen Mile Road below.
Bryant said the driver wasn’t injured.
“The guy was actually fine. We got him up, EMS was awaiting him and they checked him out,” Bryant said. “He refused treatment. He was taken to Point Pleasant so someone could come and get him. As far as injuries, he had none.”
The circumstances of this wreck were a first for the experienced Bryant.
“In the 35 years I’ve been doing this that’s was probably one of the most technical and difficult rescues we’ve been involved in,” he said. “You don’t see that every day of a tractor being basically suspended in the air.”
Bryant said he has clear explanation as to while the cab was able to hang-on that long. He said the trailer was hauling a full load of bricks weighing about 40,000 pounds.
“The only think I can say is that the Good Lord was watching out for this young man today and he was able to be successfully rescued and he’s going to live to see another day,” he said.
Emergency crews from Mason, Putnam and Kanawha counties were on the scene. The wreck happened at about 6 a.m. and the rescue was completed at around 11 a.m.
All lanes of U.S. Route 35 near the Mason County were expected to reopen by 2 p.m. The DEP was overseeing the cleanup of a fuel spill.