PHILADELPHIA — The warnings began flashing Monday about 120 miles south of where a collapsed bridge crippled a key East Coast artery, leaving thousands of trucks in the Philadelphia area facing 40-mile detours and commuters bracing for months of disruptions.
The bridge that carries Interstate 95 crumpled Sunday when a tanker truck carrying 8,500 gallons of gasoline was trying to round a curve on a ramp off the highway and flipped onto its side, authorities said. Once the gasoline ignited, experts say the blaze could have reached temperatures high enough to compromise the strength of the steel and concrete holding up the bridge. Hydraulic Guardrail Post Pile Driver
Rescue crews recovered a body from the truck’s wreckage on Monday and the medical examiner’s office is working to identify the remains, said Pennsylvania State Police spokesman Myles Snyder. While authorities haven’t made a final determination, Snyder said “there’s no evidence to suggest it’s not the driver.” The driver was identified as 53-year-old Nathan Moody, according to his cousin, Isaac Moody. He said the two were close and had seen each other Saturday.
The bridge carried about 160,000 vehicles a day. Signs of the widespread effects of the collapse were visible as far away as Columbia, Md., where northbound highway messages warned of the closure ahead. The National Transportation Safety Board sent investigators to the scene as the Biden administration pledged help, an acknowledgment of the road’s economic importance to the nation’s sixth most populous city and the congested Northeast Corridor.
Mapping the Philadelphia Interstate 95 closure and new detour routes
The bridge was constructed in 2016 and rated in good condition, according to state data. It was built as part of a $300 million project to replace bridges along a stretch of I-95 while making other updates to the highway, which runs along the spine of the East Coast from Maine to Florida. The closed segment is a portion of I-95 that splits off in Delaware and heads through Philadelphia while travelers bound for New York and points north typically transfer to the New Jersey Turnpike.
State police described a dangerous and dramatic scene, with the overturned truck sliding into a concrete support and bursting into flames. While troopers were helping a motorist escape, the northbound section of I-95 collapsed, authorities said.
Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) said rebuilding quickly was a priority, with the effects felt from New York to well south of Philadelphia.
“This a critical roadway — not just for northeast Philadelphia, not just for Philadelphia or the Philadelphia region — for the entire Mid-Atlantic,” Boyle said.
North of Washington on Monday, an overhead sign read: “Crash in Philadelphia at Exit 26. All lanes closed.”
Demolition work began Monday, but officials said replacing the bridge — and an adjacent southbound span that has been deemed unsafe for traffic — could take months. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) issued an emergency declaration that makes $7 million in state funding immediately available and allows the state to proceed without following normal bidding rules.
During the bridge’s closure, a detour includes sending traffic to U.S. 1, a far smaller road north and west of the bridge. Sean McNally, a spokesman for the American Trucking Associations, said the stretch of I-95 carries about 14,000 trucks each day. They now face lengthy detours while passing numerous traffic lights, he said.
“This will add significant cost in time, fuel and delays so we urge state and federal agencies to target appropriate resources to repairing and replacing this highway as quickly as possible,” McNally said.
Despite the closure, a steady stream of vehicles continued into the heart of the city Monday, past Lincoln Financial Field and an attorney’s billboard with a Philly-sounding message asking drivers, “Youse hurt?” Once downtown, road signs urged drivers to use Interstate 676 as an alternative, with traffic veering like a school of fish onto the detour.
A few cars remained until Exit 26, where the off-ramp led to side roads lined with rowhouses, car lots, tire stores and appliance dealers. Traffic inched forward, bumper-to-bumper, including a slow parade of cars, trucks carrying construction supplies, transit buses and a red Toyota Camry with black spray-painted rims driven by plumber Dave Marciano.
Marciano, 44, grew up nearby but now lives in New Jersey. Many of his clients are from Northeast Philadelphia and the neighborhoods near the collapse.
He stopped at a gas station on Cottman Avenue, where he filled up on gas after a long night in the nearby casino where he said he had lost “everything,” including his wallet. He was on the way to a job and said the traffic only compounded his bad day.
“It’s never like this,” he said over the buzz of news helicopters above. “Cops blocking everything.”
All around the Tacony neighborhood, police SUVs blocked off roads leading east toward the Delaware River and the collapsed interstate. Marciano said the shutdown will “inconvenience everything” since his job requires driving around North Philadelphia.
“It’s an inconvenience driving on 95 to begin with,” he said, echoing a common complaint of Philadelphians about road projects that never seem to finish.
Marciano said he’s not sure how he’ll navigate the next few months. “Leave earlier,” he said. “I’m pretty smart figuring things out.”
Officials urged commuters to use transit as an alternative to driving. Andrew Busch, spokesman for the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, said demand was higher Monday and is expected to increase Tuesday, when more people tend to head into offices. He said the agency will continue to provide extra service.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Monday he has spoken to Shapiro and Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney (D). The head of the Federal Highway Administration was at the scene and federal agencies responsible for trucking and hazardous materials were involved in the response, officials said.
Buttigieg said the region “will have the full support of the United States Department of Transportation for as long as it takes to get that restored to normal.”
As state officials assess how to restore the highway, it will be up to the National Transportation Safety Board to investigate what happened. Sarah Sulick, a spokeswoman for the board, said the team assigned to the investigation includes experts in trucking and hazardous materials, highways and emergency response. Investigators had gathered information about the truck and the company that operated it while stitching together a timeline of the emergency response.
Pa. governor predicts rebuilding Interstate 95 overpass will take months
The board is likely to issue preliminary factual findings in the coming weeks, but a full report is expected to take at least a year. The final report could include recommendations about how to prevent similar incidents in the future.
Kim Roddis, a civil engineering professor at George Washington University, said when steel reaches extremely high temperatures, its ability to carry a load is reduced.
“The bridge becomes much less strong and eventually what happens is it can’t carry its own weight and it slumps down,” Roddis said.
A study funded by the Federal Highway Administration found that fires caused bridges to collapse 30 times across the United States from 1980 through 2012. The failed bridges were made of steel 45 percent of the time, concrete in 17 percent of cases and timber in 38 percent of cases — and fully collapsed half of the time, according to researchers from the University at Buffalo.
“The crash of a tanker carrying a large amount of a highly flammable substances, wildfires, or arson can bring a modern bridge down,” the researchers wrote in 2013.
Venkatesh Kodur, a Michigan State University professor who specializes in the effects of fire on bridges, said the intense heat from thousands of gallons of burning gasoline would have dramatically weakened the span’s steel girders, dragging the bridge down under its own weight. His lab tests have shown such heat can cause a steel bridge to fail within 30 to 40 minutes.
Kodur, who was part of a Federal Emergency Management Agency team examining the collapse of the World Trade Center towers after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, said the Philadelphia collapse underscores the need for new bridge projects to include more fire protection measures.
“You design these bridges for earthquakes. You design them for wind … But we don’t design them today for fires, ” he said. “Those standards have to change.”
He suggested fire prevention work could be directed toward the most critical bridges, adding that the amount would be less than 5 percent of a bridge’s cost. “All you need to do on these girders is to protect them with some insulation material, which is very cheap,” Kodur said.
In 2007, a gasoline tanker overturned and caught fire near the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, causing a section of highway to collapse. In 2017, an elevated section of Interstate 85 in Georgia collapsed after a fire. The NTSB concluded it had been caused by coils of plastic and pieces of fiberglass stored underneath the road.
Despite a history of similar incidents, they remain so rare that some experts said it would be too expensive to add fireproofing to every bridge in the country. Andy Herrmann, a former president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, said standard design guides take into account earthquake protection and other risks, but guarding against fires is not typically a priority.
“The cost to fireproof all overpasses all over the country would be tremendous,” he said.
Many people living and working in the blue-collar neighborhoods shrugged off the collapse as yet another construction project to put up with in a city that’s full of them. Wes Nunez stood outside the business he manages, Torresdale Appliance, watching a jammed two-lane road that has become a key detour for the highway.
“It will probably be almost close to a year, the way Philly is,” he said of the replacement bridge’s construction.
Binoy Cherian, 47, who drives cars back and forth between car lots and regional auctions for an auto dealership in the Tacony neighborhood, said he drove over the blocked portion of I-95 three or four times a day before the collapse, each trip taking no more than 20 minutes.
On Monday, using detours, he said the trips back to the dealership took nearly an hour.
“What are you going to do?” he said. “You get up early and go to work early.”
The area is a tightly knit constellation of neighborhoods filled with the descendants of Irish and Italian immigrants who helped found the area, as well as diverse families with roots in countries across the world. Along a small main street in the Mayflower neighborhood, Michael Billings, 40, who grew up nearby, said the neighborhood was unbowed by the collapse.
Residents, he said, would adjust.
“We always find ways to prevail,” Billings said of his fellow Philadelphians. “This is where independence happened.”
Duncan and Laris reported from Washington.
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