Truck hits Winston-Salem bridge

Traffic was snarled on the south side of Winston-Salem Friday afternoon when a truck struck and damaged the underside of the bridge that carries Clemmonsville Road over Peters Creek Parkway.

The truck was traveling south on Peters Creek Parkway. The truck appeared to be the kind that has a hydraulic lift on the back for placing and removing large bins. It was evidently not configured to have enough clearance to make it under the bridge. Shortly before 4 p.m., the truck struck the underside of the bridge, damaged a girder and left a pile of concrete rubble on the highway below.

The truck came to a stop on the right side of the parkway on the south side of the bridge. A woman who stopped to check on the driver said at first she thought he had died because he wasn’t moving. The driver’s name and condition were not available Friday night.

A state highway official said the bridge would have to remain closed until an inspection can be carried out, and may have to stay closed longer depending on the amount of damage and what it will take to make repairs.

Chuck White, bridge superintendent for the N.C. Department of Transportation, said that after looking at the bridge Friday he could see exposed rebar on one of the concrete girders that supports the bridge over the southbound lanes of Peters Creek Parkway.

“The bottom of the girder is exposed and looks damaged,” he said. “We want to err on the side of safety and see how much damage there is.”

At first, the accident resulted in the closure of the southbound lanes only of Peters Creek Parkway, and traffic continued passing over on the bridge. The bridge was then closed off completely to Clemmonsville Road traffic, and the northbound lanes of the parkway were closed as well.

Traffic was diverted from the closed sections of roadway, and that didn’t make life easy for Friday afternoon commuters getting off work and going about their errands.

Bianca Bink Brown was the woman who stopped to check on the truck driver, and posted a video to her Facebook page that showed first responders checking on the driver after they arrived. But at first, she said, she was the only person there.

“Something told me to stop and check what was going on,” she said. “I saw debris. I saw the truck. The truck had driven up into a tree.”

Brown said she could see the driver through the window of the door, but that he was not in his seat and was not moving. She called 911. She thought the driver was dead. She said she didn’t approach too closely because she smelled a strong odor of fuel in the area. When first responders came and checked on the driver, she said, she could hear him complaining about a lack of feeling in places he was being checked.

As she left, Brown said, she saw emergency workers removing a stretcher from an ambulance.

On Facebook, Brown thanked God for putting her in a place to check on the truck driver.

“People were just passing by,” she said.

Meanwhile, White said the northbound lanes of Peters Creek Parkway can reopen because the part of the bridge over those lanes was not affected by the damage to the girder over the southbound lanes.

But White could not say how soon the bridge itself or the southbound lanes of the parkway might reopen.