Moody’s cousin, Isaac Moody, a truck driver himself, said Thursday he was unaware of the tanker manhole cover issue but knew Nathan to be a safety conscious driver who stayed up on regulations and training requirements.
“It’s so easy for them to throw the blame on the trucker in almost every accident that happens,” Isaac Moody said in a phone interview. “As soon as a trucker cannot defend themselves, they find all kinds of stuff.”
An NTSB interview with Philadelphia Battalion Chief Theodore Quedenfeld said that early on, firefighters faced “a lot of fire coming out of the storm sewers from the runoff” and that eventually multiple manhole covers from storm sewers became projectiles, flying into the air from the pressure of exploding gasoline.
Firefighters had to shut down their lines for a time because they could not say for sure whether any of the storm sewers were feeding branches that would go toward a water treatment plant, he said.
There were “dozens, dozens” of explosions, he said.
“It seemed like you would get an explosion and then it would kind of snuff itself out, but the heat would, you know, cause it to reignite as soon as it got a little oxygen,” Quedenfeld told the NTSB.
Philadelphia Fire Capt. Cary Boyd told the NTSB when his team first arrived on the scene “every square foot of that underpass was nothing but flame.”
Later, Boyd said, “the manhole covers were popping and they were big manholes, they’re not the little ones. So there was a tremendous amount of pressure there.”
The NTSB documents also included a two-page policy issued in 2022 by trucking firm Penn Tank Lines Inc. of Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, that mandated pre-trip inspections of tanker manhole covers by truck drivers. That policy described the manhole covers as devices that will form a seal in case of a vehicle rollover and noted an incident a year earlier in which a cover had been left unsecured, “allowing leakage and causing an environmental spill.”
Moody, 53, who lived in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, was an owner-operator with a commercial driver’s license since 2003, investigators said. He leased his truck to TK Transport Inc. of Pennsauken, New Jersey, which has been a Penn Tank Lines affiliate since 2001. Phone messages were left Wednesday and Thursday seeking comment from TK Transport, Penn Tank Lines and executives with the companies.
The section of I-95 carried about 160,000 vehicles daily before the crash.
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