The oracle of bridge crashes has another report from Saturday night

Three days after a Have You Heard? story came out about the “truck-killing bridge” on Waterman, Bruce Rowley — the newly named oracle of bridge crashes — had another update.

First, to briefly recount: When Rowley moved his office near Waterman and Commerce more than a decade ago, he began noticing how many trucks regularly crash into a railroad bridge there.

He’d already gained some notoriety for chronicling the crashes online. Following the article, Rowley said, it’s all anyone wants to talk to him about.

Since developer Gary Oborny moved his office to the icehouse on the other side of the bridge from Rowley a few years ago, the two have kept up with crash details for each other.

So it made sense Saturday night after the two separately left a party for the nonprofit Grumpy Old Men in Delano for Oborny to phone Rowley with a couple of reports.

First, he warned Rowley not to get on Kellogg because an accident had traffic backed up. Oborny said he’d already detoured to Waterman.

Rowley picked up the story from there.

“He was trailing a double-trailer truck that was heading toward the infamous Waterman bridge,” Rowley said.

“I’m like, OK, I’ll go try to warn this guy,” Oborny said.

He was trailing the truck by about three stoplights, not sure how he was going to get to the driver to alert him he likely couldn’t fit under the bridge, when the driver realized it on his own and turned off Waterman.

“I said, ‘Bruce, we’re good. He saved himself.’ ”

“So, crisis averted, right?” Rowley said.

Wrong.

At about 11:30, reports and photos started coming in to Rowley that the truck had gotten stuck in Old Town at the Douglas railroad bridge, which is 9 inches higher than the one on Waterman.

The first trailer on the truck made it under the bridge, but the second one got stuck.

“I think the length of his truck contributed to his stuckedness,” Rowley said.

When Rowley alerted Oborny to what happened, Oborny replied with shock and a few unprintable words.

Oborny said he felt bad for the driver, whom he speculated must have gotten off of Kellogg due to the traffic jam and couldn’t find his way back to it through the city without getting stuck.

“It’s like a mouse getting caught in a maze,” Oborny said. “He just couldn’t escape the maze.”

He wondered how in this age of technology, where a lot of trucks are tracked by satellite, there aren’t some kind of GPS warnings for drivers approaching bridges that are too short for their trucks.

Oborny said some cities hang chains from cables ahead of bridges to alert drivers to their height, although “aesthetically it doesn’t look real great.”

He said maybe detectors could be used to judge truck heights and then flash lights to alert drivers if they can’t pass.

After the first article, a few other Wichitans responded with additional ideas to protect trucks and the bridge.

Perhaps there could be a contest with the best solution, Oborny said.

In the meantime, Rowley is making peace with his newly official status as the oracle of bridge crashes, as Oborny has dubbed him, although it hurts just a bit.

“I opened a brand-new apartment building downtown in the last week,” Rowley said of the Arnold, “but everyone wants to talk about the bridge.”

There could be one bright side, Rowley noted.

“Let’s just hope that all of this notoriety from this article plays even a small role in some truck driver in Wichita avoiding their doom under that bridge.”

This story was originally published November 17, 2025 at 2:10 PM.