Above, raw video footage of the Nov. 8 collision in Boston
BOSTON — A Morrisburg truck driver backed up Boston traffic when the transport he was driving collided with the ceiling in the American city’s O’Neill tunnel.
No one was hurt in the Nov. 8 incident. The driver, Bryan Elliott, escaped with a pair of tickets issued by state troopers and a friendly on-air interview with a local TV news station in which the 59-year-old South Dundas resident apologizes to city commuters for the inconvenience.
Beantown motorists were held up for a reported 90-plus minutes after the dramatic crash captured on video by a Massachusetts Department of Transportation camera. The footage shows the moment the container box on a trailer towed by Elliott catches the tunnel ceiling around 6 a.m. and disintegrates in a shower of dust. Cars swerve to avoid the suddenly stopped truck and crumpled wreckage.
7 News Boston — formerly an NBC affiliate but now independent — reported that police cited Elliott for having a load that was over-width and over-height.
In his interview with the station’s Steve Cooper, the Snap Trucking of Iroquois employee is reported as saying he drove the same truck through the I-93 tunnel without problem days earlier. He explains that paperwork shows the container box measured 8’6″ high. When placed atop the five-foot flat-bed trailer, the combination should have come to 13’6″ — the allowable limit in the tunnel. “I don’t know,” the “baffled” trucker tells the reporter.
