THE wreck

This accident was caused by a 3rd year apprentice named Marci Bent. She was running a rubber tired asphalt compactor, it has 10 tires and must weigh around 40,000lbs. She had lots of hours on this particular machine but she was nervous about working on this hill. It happened on the Eklutna Road project on August 07, 2003. Eklutna Road is a very narrow road – only a 20 foot top and the hill that was being paved that day is about a mile long with a 13% grade at it's steepest.

We had all put in a long day, 14 hours, installing culverts so we could get more road ready for paving. Leonard and I were in the company truck following the pilot car and some traffic down the hill to the job shack.

We passed Marci at the very top of the (approximately) 2 mile section they were paving that day. We were already near the bottom when she started down the hill in second gear –she had been told to use first gear only going downhill because everyone knew the brakes would not stop that machine. After already gaining speed she tried to shift into first, as soon as she took it out of gear it sped up and then she couldn’t get it into any gear. Leonard (he was driving) and I were at the bottom of the hill just after the first corner, she had about a mile run before she caught up to us so she had built up quite a bit of speed. Leonard saw her come around the corner on two wheels and heard her screaming for us to get out of the way. We might have been doing 5mph because there was traffic in front of us, she had to be doing 50. I never saw her coming.

It's a good thing that she ran into a full sized one-ton four door truck instead of the little cars we were following. She would have driven right through them but our truck was tall enough that her machine hit us in the frame and it was heavy enough to knock her off into the ditch with us. She stayed with the compactor till it flipped over in the ditch and didn't get hurt. I have no idea how. We rolled spun around in the road then rolled 2 times in the ditch.

Leonard got a pretty nasty 2 inch gash in his head ... I got a black eye and jammed my neck really hard.

I'm pissed	Leonard bleeding	wreck	wreck
wreck	wreck	wreck	wreck
wreck	wreck	Everyone is just amazed	wreck