Semis hauling milk, used mattress springs tipped Monday on Wichita-area highways: KHP
A pair of semis that tipped over in separate incidents Monday tied up traffic on Sedgwick County highways during the morning commute. One was hauling a load of milk. The other was carrying thousands of pounds of used mattress springs, Kansas Highway Patrol Trooper Chad Crittenden said.
In the first crash, at about 8:25 a.m., an International Truck Tractor towing a tanker trailer full of milk lost control on a curved stretch of the eastbound K-96 off-ramp that leads to eastbound U.S. 54, causing it to go off the shoulder “and roll to a stop in the ditch,” the Kansas Highway Patrol said in a crash report.
The milk truck was traveling “too fast for conditions” and “didn’t get slowed down enough to negotiate the turn,” Crittenden said. The crash shut down the ramp for about four hours.
About 35 minutes after the first crash, a Kenworth semi pulling a trailer full of used mattress springs tipped to the right, “causing the power unit to overturn” as it was trying to merge onto K-15 from southbound I-135 in southeast Wichita, according to Crittenden and a Kansas Highway Patrol crash report. The truck “slid across” two lanes of traffic and stopped in a third, the KHP said.
“Like 4,000 pounds of springs everywhere,” Crittenden said, describing the scene. That area was also closed to traffic for some time, he said.
Both truck drivers were hospitalized with minor injuries, the highway patrol says. One is from Florida. The other is from Oklahoma, according to the reports.
Crittenden said the sites of both of Monday’s crashes have been problematic in the past, mostly for commercial vehicles, even though there are warnings posted advising drivers to slow down.
“You got to take those ramps slow,” he said.
This story was originally published August 23, 2021 at 5:14 PM.
