A car navigates around a stuck tractor-trailer Friday at the Concord Avenue rotary by Fresh Pond in Cambridge. (Photo: Marc Levy)
It wasn’t as dramatic as a Storrowing – when box trucks try to go under bridges on Boston’s Storrow Drive and drivers discover, oops, they should have measured first – but traffic was still slowed Friday afternoon when a tractor-trailer got hung up in the Concord Avenue rotary by Fresh Pond.
Just before 4:55 p.m. a truck driver on the way to Ayer to pick up water bottles bound for Vermont got in trouble avoiding the smaller vehicles around him on a small New England road.
“Drivers don’t really like to come into the Massachusetts area, because everything is so tight,” said Sergio Toma, a safety manager for Winds Transportation of Milton, Vermont, owner of the tractor-trailer. He spoke by phone Saturday. “Driving in Texas and Massachusetts is a big difference.”
It’s legal to take trucks that size through the rotary, but making the turn there too sharply, the driver found himself stuck on the center island for a little over an hour and a half while waiting for a heavy-duty tow truck to come help.
State Police Troop H personnel were on scene directing drivers around the stuck truck and coordinating the tow. The driver “just doesn’t have traction with the tires on the cab, so they just need to pull,” a trooper said to tell towing companies, according to scanner reports. “There’s no damage. It can be driven away.”
But just as troopers were caught in the slowed rush-hour traffic on the way to help, so were trucks run by Boston’s Todisco Towing. After more than an hour, the closest were still in Revere or on Interstate 93. Eventually the troopers canceled with Todisco and Mal’s Servicenter in Lexington got a truck to the area at 6:24 p.m. Troopers shut down Concord Avenue so the tow truck could do its work, clearing the obstruction by 6:37 p.m.
The truck driver waited in his cab the whole time, waiting and frustrated.
“He got tires caught in the air, so he didn’t have traction,” Toma said.
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