A few minutes after smashing his U-Haul into the North 21st Street underpass Friday morning, the driver backs away from the scene.
Last month, I wrote a story about how a man driving a pickup and pulling a skid steer on a trailer crashed into and damaged the railroad underpass at North 21st Street between Minnesota and Montana avenues.
Well, this morning a little after 11, I was standing about 20 feet away when another person, this one driving a U-Haul, crashed into the underpass, which is owned by Montana Rail Link.
I had to go to the post office anyway, so I took my dogs and made a walk of it, heading east on Minnesota Avenue to North 21st. The sidewalks on either side of the underpass aren’t shoveled, so I was walking in the street, on the left side of the roadway. My dogs and I had just cleared the underpass when a car turned toward us off Montana, so we were cutting through a snowbank to the buried sidewalk.
Suddenly there was a terrible, extremely loud crashing sound, and I spun around to see a smallish U-Haul still jammed up against the south side of the underpass. “The driver backed up a few feet, jumped out, ran to the front of the van and started screaming, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”
Then he began screaming about something else.
“Goddamn that GPS! I never should have trusted that goddamned thing! It told me to turn here! Oh, my God,” and so on.
The underpass, I should menti0n, has a clearance of only 8 feet and has been run into many times over the years. A heavy “crash beam” is attached to both sides of the structure to absorb the impact and protect the underpass. The collision I wrote about in December actually knocked the crash beam off, resulting in closure of the underpass for about 10 days. Today’s accident didn’t seem to have damaged the crash beam.
I gave the driver directions to the 13th Street underpass, which is big enough to accommodate semitrucks, and after some more unkind words directed at his GPS, he drove off. I snapped a few photos of the U-Haul with my phone, but you really can’t see the damage very well. It was in bad shape. At least he had purchased damage insurance, he said.
It reminded me of having written numerous stories about rocks tumbling down off the Rims over the years, and then finally seeing a spontaneous rock fall in the aftermath of a much larger incident last spring. I had written several stories about drivers crashing into the 21st Street underpass, too, but I never expected to witness, or very nearly witness, such a collision.
