Stuck trucks, lost trucks, collapsed bridges, mad homeowners, costly tickets and downtime. No carrier wants the embarrassing headlines caused by truckers following GPS navigation into areas where Class 8 trucks simply don’t belong.
And whether it’s not quite high enough or strong enough, it’s bridges that usually bear the most dramatic evidence of truckers who unquestionably follow GPS.
In August, an Iowa truck driver brought down a historic bridge in Westphalia, Missouri. The Pentecostal Bridge, with a posted five-ton limit, fell 30 feet to the Maries River under the weight of a 2020 Freightliner Cascadia. The 55-year-old driver who walked away from the twisted wreck told the Missouri State Highway Patrol that GPS had led him to the bridge.
“It was quite a fall,” MSHP Sgt. Scott White said. “It was pretty destructive and the fact that he wasn’t injured was miraculous or that the truck didn’t end up in the water or when it did land that it didn’t roll over into the water. There’s just a thousand different scenarios you could think. Things that could have happened and didn’t.”
Forty thousand pounds of bagged animal feed spilled from the severed trailer onto the river bank below. It’s not clear how much of that load was recovered. A mobile crane removed the mangled 127-year-old bridge and what was left of the truck. The driver was charged with ignoring the bridge’s weight limit.
In addition to losing the truck and trailer, there’s the cost of clean-up and bridge replacement. Though interview requests from CCJ went unanswered, Osage County Commissioner Larry Kliethermes told his local paper, The Unterrified Democrat, that a county prosecutor had advised commissioners to “get as much information as possible about the trucking company and let our insurance know about the situation.”
A similar bridge collapse occurred in Yell County, Arkansas, last year when a California man attempted to drive his tractor-trailer over a historic bridge spanning the Petit Jean River. The 35-year-old driver who said he had been following his GPS survived the plunge and was ticketed for exceeding the bridge’s posted 6-ton weight limit. The trailer had been carrying a load of processed chicken.
