18 car tanker rollover!!!

Wow, what a great day!!! Not only did we get to work on a rollover but it was a tanker!  We got a taste of one of the biggest accidents in recent memory. 18 cars and 1 rollover tanker. Its been a day since the crash and recovery and my adrenalin is still pumping. No one knows what happened to cause the tanker to lose control but the current theory is that as the tanker was approaching the tollbooths, he dozed off or became distracted, when he came too, he was still at full speed and almost at the booth. He swerved and cut it too hard and ended up rolling over and the whole unit slid into all the people waiting to pay the toll. He was loaded with cream (like a thick milk). Amazingly no one was killed but there was over 30 injured and only 1 major extrication. The fire truck hooked a chain to the tanker tandems and pulled it away from the worst car. Most of the milk had leaked out b4 we started up righting. One of the cars/pickups involved had a few boxes of fish and other food goods- this was spilled all over the place and let me tell you- this mixed with the milk was the most disgusting mess- thank the lord the skyway cleaned up the mess and we did not. The pics from the helo are from http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=local&id=3420478 and there is video on the site too

 

The skyway had several light duty companies relocate most off the cars b4 the big boys got into position. I posted pics of the cars closer to the end of this post. We (Lin-Mar) were not the primary contractor, we were working with Airline towing who is the contracted heavy recovery agent for the skyway. I wish I had pics of the actually up righting, but I gave my camera to a fireman and asked him to take pics for me wail I was working- somehow one of the night focus features got turned off and none of the pics he took turned out- so out of over 130 pics- I have 34 to show.  You cant see it very well but there is very slippery cream all over the ground and this was not only very hazardous for walking but the tanker did not want to come up- it only wanted to slide. We both put our trucks at a 90 degree angle to the casualty. We used the rotator and hooked to the front axel and the tractor tandems. Airline had 1 line to the tanker tandems and one double laid strap (for shortening purposes) in a Christmas wrap style. We ended up using the skyways end loader to lift the top of the tanker up some- as you can imagine- every second the whole e/b side of the skyway is closed, they are loosing big $$$ ($2.50 per car) so they were in a big hurry

We pulled the tanker over and airline straitened out the tractor and towed them away.