I probably mentioned these before. I don't remember if I did.
At Caltrans we had one like that where the driver wasn't so fortunate.
I was scheduled to visit a highway construction field office, that was supervising construction of an overpass over a busy freeway in Los Angeles. The evening before arriving there, I saw on the news that 'falsework' (temporary structure and forms for pouring a concrete overpass) had fallen at a freeway project. This brought a huge support timber in the falsework down on a truck cab and the driver didn't survive. I recognized that as the location I planned to visit. In the morning I called the field office to cancel, they didn't need a random quality audit of their project recordkeeping to arrive at the same time as probably a lot of Federal, State, maybe County safety investigators.
I learned details that hadn't been apparent on the TV news: The project engineer said while it was a crane truck that caused the crash, the truck was just a random motorist passing through and wasn't related to the construction project at all.
What had happened was the crane truck that brought down the timber had the boom for its crane resting in a cradle over or in front of the cab, but the front end of the boom wasn't secured to the cradle. The boom had bounced up and snagged the timber as the truck drove under the project at freeway speed. The boom caught the last timber he had to pass under so this didn't bring down the entire falsework structure, only that last huge timber and some minor framing. What had seemed on the TV news to be a construction site bridge collapse was deadly but the news hadn't accurately described it.
And I suppose another incident is an example of Hauling Something Wrong.
I arrived at a construction field office in the Sierras and learned the morning's excitement was their Runaway Truck Ramp on the long downgrade west of Donner Summit (8k ft) had received its first customer! A fully loaded moving van, they said 45k lbs cargo (plus the weight of the truck). No injuries, nothing serious to the truck beyond dented fuel tanks etc where it had plowed on its belly through the deep gravel for a few hundred ft as it ground to a halt.
The only damage to State property was the wrecker pulled down a lamp post because he didn't have anything better to anchor to when he pulled the truck back out. I wrote in my project review no problems noted - but future Runaway Truck Ramp designs should include winching anchors.
