TAMPA, Fla. -- An overnight wreck Friday along the Selmon Expressway was serious enough that they had to call out structural engineers to make sure the roadway was safe for thousands of commuters.
The crash impacted one of the support columns that hold up the toll road’s elevated express lanes near 78th Street in Tampa.
With traffic zipping past them, structural engineers took a closer at the pillar Friday morning.
At about 2:00 a.m., a Mitsubishi SUV plowed through the guardrail, rolled over and struck the support pillar so hard that it left an impression of the vehicle’s wheel embedded in the concrete.
“And so, that’s obviously a concern,” said the toll road authority’s spokesperson, Sue Chrzan. “So, again, we went out to make sure that everything was structurally in place.”
In 2004, when the expressway’s elevated overpass was first constructed, a sinkhole under just one of the support columns brought down an entire section of the overhead span.
In March, the collapse of a compromised pedestrian bridge killed six people in South Florida.
Commuters were understandably anxious for inspectors to confirm "the integrity of the bridge, of course, and let us know,” said one woman exiting the highway Friday.
“I just want to make sure that the bridge doesn’t collapse like the one in Miami did, because it’s the same construction (company) that did this one,” said another driver who had just driven over the span.
The Florida Highway Patrol has identified the driver of the SUV that struck the column as 38-year-old Daniel Suarez. Suarez was transported to TGH with minor injuries and later arrested for DUI.
Engineers were concerned not just with the concrete pillar Suarez struck, but with a joint near the top of the column that connects it with a support beam.
“If they don’t see any cracks or anything like that, then we know that it didn’t hurt the structural integrity of the column,” said Chrzan, “And therefore it wouldn’t go all the way up.”
Within hours, engineers were able to determine the column had absorbed the energy of the crash without any cracks and without any chipping.
The expressway authority says the vehicle also took out a major light post, which may have slowed it down before it made impact with the support pillar.
That’s welcome news for the estimated 26,000 drivers who use that stretch of road every day.
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