Posted on 04/30/2007 10:09:28 AM PDT by radar101
James Mosqueda, the driver in Sunday's fiery fuel-tanker crash, climbed out of the cab of his truck just moments before an explosion so powerful and hot that it melted steel and brought down a freeway, witnesses and law enforcement officials said.
Mosqueda, a 51-year-old father of three from Woodland (Yolo County), walked away from the wreck -- and kept on walking.
He walked for a mile and a half in all -- first along the overpass where he crashed and then for at least 13 blocks through the desolate streets of West Oakland -- to an Arco gas station, where he approached a cabdriver and asked for a ride to a hospital, police said.
The Friendly Cab driver, who identified himself to The Chronicle only as Anthony, 46, of San Jose, said he had just pulled into the gas station at West Grand Avenue and Market Street when he saw Mosqueda.
"He walked up to me. He was in pain. He was telling me he was dying. He had blisters, bubbles on his hands. Part of his hair was burnt," the cabbie said.
California Highway Patrol spokesman Trent Cross said Mosqueda was driving at an unsafe speed in a 50 mph zone, moving in the right lane of the two-lane connector ramp between westbound Interstate 80 and southbound Interstate 880, when he struck the right guardrail, causing the truck to overturn.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Survivor of Tanker Inferno and Walk through Oakland Killed by Falling Piano
Rosie is an expert in so many fields, isn’t she?
She’s an expert in engineering and building construction and physics.
She’s an expert in constitutional law.
She’s an expert in various medical fields.
Now that she’s out of a job on the View, I hope she gets the job of supervising the rebuilding of the bridge.
Something tells me that insurance on gasoline trucks doesn't cover the replacement of a bridge. Maybe it should since they can be very destructive.
There was a very small town near where I grew up. In the middle of this town the main road took a sharp turn. A gasoline truck once missed this turn. All that was left of the town was the bank vault. In many years I never saw the town rebuilt.
If his skin wasn’t sliding off him in sheets and parts didn’t look like pig cracklin’s he wasn’t dying.
If you have ever seen anyone with 3rd degree burns you will never forget it!
1st degree..redness of skin.
2nd degree.. blisters.
3rd degree..skin destroyed and falling off in sheets.
I remember seeing my mother being pulled out of our house with 3rd degree burns way back in 1956. Again, you will NEVER forget it!
Perhaps he knew he was going to be in big trouble when the police arrived.
But.....but.....but......How can this be?......This must be a mistake......Rosie said she KNOWS that 9-11 was an inside job done by the Bush administration because "in the history of the world fire has never melted metal."
I hope someone points this "miracle" out to that homocow. It has to be a miracle because we KNOW metal can't be melted by fire. < / sarcasm >
Maybe he is an illegal and he wanted to get away from the crash site before the cops got there!
Traumatic shock can be fatal, can it not? While modern medicine should generally allow an excellent prognosis for someone with only second-degree burns, such a person could still die in short order if left untreated.
The damage done by this particular truck doesn't seem astonishingly high, compared with what such trucks might do in other circumstances. I don't know how much a section of bridge costs, but the truck knocked out two or three sections of fairly ordinary elevated highway. I would think that a truck that exploded near a suburban shopping mall gas station would do a lot more damage, and that trucking companies would have to be covered for that.
In a large city which will remain nameless there is a major highway that crosses a lake via a long floating bridge. On both ends of the bridge are tunnels. Sometimes on adjacent highways there are illuminated signs that say gasoline trucks may not take the short cut across the lake. But the signs are only displayed a small percentage of the time. These times don’t seem to relate directly to traffic. It would seen prudent to prevent the trucks from crossing the lake altogether, although it would mean a lot of longer trips. I haven’t figured out the logic of this.
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