Traffic on Interstate 75 northbound near the Hillsborough County line was backed up for hours Thursday by an accident involving a tanker truck and a box truck.
The line of stopped vehicles stretched two miles from Buckeye Road to the county line at one point in the early afternoon.
The transportation mess started at around 1:30 p.m. as a tanker truck out of Jacksonville rear ended a 1974 Chevy box truck in the outside, northbound lane, Florida Highway Patrol Trooper Todd Bergman said. The collision sent the box truck onto the shoulder of the road, ejecting a 27-year-old woman.
The driver of the tanker then took evasive action and his truck ground to a halt, blocking both northbound lanes.
One lane was reopened in an hour, but it took several hours for the roadway to be cleared,
The woman was airlifted to Bayfront Medical Center in St. Petersburg with non-life threatening injuries. She had injuries to a leg.
A man and a 5-year-old child in the box truck had minor injuries and were taken by ambulance to All Children's Hospital in St. Petersburg.
There are pending charges against the box truck driver for not having the child properly restrained in the truck.
The driver of the tanker, Darnell Perry, 59, was not injured in the accident and was to be cited for careless driving, Bergman said.
The last serious tanker involved crash was on June 4 in Manatee County when Raymond Neumann, 54, of Brooksville, who was driving a tanker full of fuel, tried to steer clear of a pickup truck that had fishtailed while trying to merge into traffic on the overpass at U.S. 301 on I-75.
His tanker hit another vehicle, then went over the bridge's wall, dropping 25 feet, landing on U.S. 301 and narrowly missing vehicles passing beneath. Neumann died several days later after sustaining injuries.
A firestorm from the burning fuel destroyed the overhead, concrete structure. It was weeks before the I-75 overpass was fully reconstructed and normal traffic patterns were restored.
E-Mail
Print
@Nyx.CommentBody@