{"id":5228,"date":"2015-01-16T13:07:03","date_gmt":"2015-01-16T20:07:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=5228"},"modified":"2015-07-26T17:01:38","modified_gmt":"2015-07-26T23:01:38","slug":"another-vehicle-slams-into-railroad-underpass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2015\/01\/another-vehicle-slams-into-railroad-underpass\/","title":{"rendered":"Another vehicle slams into railroad underpass"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Underpass\"<\/a>

A few minutes after smashing his U-Haul into the North 21st Street underpass Friday morning, the driver backs away from the scene.<\/p><\/div>\n

Last month, I wrote a story <\/a>about how a man\u00a0driving 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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!”<\/p>\n

Then he began screaming about something else.<\/p>\n

“Goddamn that GPS! I never should have trusted that goddamned thing! It told me to turn here! Oh, my God,” and so on.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>I walked back with my dogs and talked to the driver for a few minutes. He was pretty upset and I couldn’t get much of a coherent story out of him, but apparently he lives here and had been down in Wyoming picking up some belongings. He said he was on his way to Rent-A-Wreck on First Avenue North.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I gave the driver\u00a0directions 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last month, I wrote a story about how a man\u00a0driving 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5229,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[307,1954,1953],"class_list":["post-5228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-montana-rail-link","tag-u-haul","tag-underpass","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5228\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}