VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (WVEC/AP) — All lanes of traffic on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel reopened early Tuesday morning, about 17 hours after a tractor-trailer crashed inside the Thimble Shoal tunnel leading to massive traffic delays and motorists stranded on both sides of the Bay.
Driver Guy Sorensen said he and his girlfriend were driving from Philadelphia after completing the Susan G. Komen 3-Day 60-mile walk. He said their crawl along the bridge began at 2:30 pm.
“Even on social media with other friends that were stuck in this traffic, we were betting on who was going to get there first and pretending to race,” said Sorensen. “And then it just turned into this thing where 'ok this isn’t cute and fun anymore.'”
Sorensen said he was stuck on the bridge for seven hours.
“For people to sit on that bridge for seven hours is unacceptable,” said Sorensen. “There’s medical emergencies. What about bathroom[s]?"
Several drivers who were stuck at the bridge-tunnel told 13News Now they saw other drivers relieving themselves on the side of the road because there was literally nowhere else to go.
“It was so frustrating that that wasn’t better planned for,” said Sorensen. “But as soon as we came out and we saw the light at the end of the tunnel, it was great.”
In a statement Tuesday, the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel District said that a toll relief fund will be set up "for travelers who were inconvenienced" by Monday's accident.
The CBBT District said the tractor-trailer was being operated by Chesapeake Tunnel Joint Venture, the company that is building the new parallel Thimble Shoal Channel Tunnel. The vehicle was hauling a piece of construction equipment which struck the tunnel ceiling and then fell into the roadway around 11 a.m. Monday.
Tom Anderson, Deputy Executive Director of Finance and Operations for CBBT, said the tractor-trailer driver was charged by bridge-tunnel police with misdemeanor "overheight bridge and tunnel." A section of Virginia state code limits vehicle heights to 13 feet, 6 inches (4.1 meters).
No one was hurt, but traffic in both directions was completely halted for several hours. Because it was a vehicle being used on the new tunnel construction, it did not travel through the toll lanes so its height was not checked by the usual system.
PHOTOS: Tractor-trailer crash shuts down CBBT for hours
Anderson said they didn’t have a plan in place for something of that magnitude because they had never experienced an incident like that before.
“The outcome of what happened yesterday was really something that we didn’t anticipate,” Anderson said. “The normal process when we do alternating traffic around the scene of an accident might delay customers 15-20 minutes…in this case, customers experienced a lot worse outcomes than that. But it really wasn’t evident that that was going to happen until it was too late.”
When asked what CBBT will do to make sure this doesn’t happen again, Anderson said, “I think in this case we need to do a better job of advising customers at the toll lane of what to expect when they come out on the bridge.”
Around 3:20 p.m., a single lane was reopened to allow alternating north and southbound traffic around the accident scene, but backups of several miles in both directions remained.
Traffic on the bridge-tunnel was again fully closed at 10 p.m. Monday night to allow for the removal of the semi and fallen equipment from the tunnel.
By 3:30 a.m. Tuesday, the accident scene was finally cleared and all lanes of traffic once again fully reopened.
Construction on a parallel tunnel project at Thimble Shoals officially started Oct. 1, 2017, after a groundbreaking ceremony in September, and it is estimated the project will be completed in fall 2022, at a projected cost of nearly $756 million.
When completed, the new tunnel will carry two lanes of traffic southbound and the existing tunnel will carry two lanes of traffic northbound.
Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunne... by on Scribd
Delmarva Now contributed to this report.
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