Lumber Recovery on I-5: No Job Too Big

When other towing companies from the Seattle-Tacoma area refused to accept the job of cleaning up debris from a major accident scene Friday night, crews from Airport Towing went to work.

Heavy duty tow trucks were called to an accident scene on I-5 in SeaTac this weekend that involved an overturned semi truck and a 53 foot long trailer full of milled alder. The tow truck operators were unable to upright the truck with the load attached, so they cut it loose and abandoned it in the median. The off ramp was shut down until DOT crews could push the loose materials out of the roadway with a frontloader and the truck was hauled away. After one lane was reopened, the insurance agent on scene of the major incident was told she had to find someone who could finish the job.

With thousands of board feet of lumber on the ground, she called Airport Towing to finish the job other companies refused to do. Trucks were dispatched to the scene immediately and Airport Towing made a quick assessment of what equipment would be needed to handle the complicated task. One heavy duty tow truck responded immediately along with a large 3 axle carrier and a forklift. Other equipment used was a second flatbed, an additional forklift, two tow trucks for traffic control, and nine personnell.

What made the job increasingly complicated was most of the stacks of lumber had broken apart and were loose on the ground. All but three bundles had to be carried by hand out of the median and up to the pavement where they were neatly restacked and lifted by forklift onto flatbed tow trucks. The three surviving bundles were only half broken apart and were able to be lifted by a large wrecker. Specialized recovery straps were used to choke the load together and bring it up onto the roadway as individual sections.

The load recovery was so labor intensive it required 83 man hours of labor with a total on scene time of over 12 hours. Crews from Airport Towing are confident that if they had been given the opportunity to manage the accident recovery from the beginning, the load could have been manipulated or the truck uprighted in a way that would have cut down on the efforts that followed to recover the load.

DOT crews praised Airport Towing for their efforts on scene as they worked through the night and into the next morning. “You guys do good work,” stated a DOT worker on scene at the time of the incident recovery. Airport Towing once again proved themselves capable of handling large and complicated emergency incidents and  made sure to continue working on scene until all lumber and debris were completely recovered.