CATAWBA, N.C. -- "It could have been a whole lot worse," said Chief Donald Robinson of the Catawba Fire Department as he watched emergency workers trudging through the dry corn that came up to their ankles as they walked across N.C. 10 East. "I'm telling you, this had the potential to be disaster 10 times worse than this."
The truck driver, a white male approximately 60 years old whose name has not been released, was driving east at about 7:15 a.m. when the back wheels of his trailer went off the side of the road. The wheels caught a culvert and sheared the back third of his trailer off, Robinson said.
The trailer detached from the truck and both started flipping down the highway sending up a cloud of dust, smoke and corn.
The driver had been hauling about 50,000 pounds of corn in an open-top semi trailer and headed to a mill in Statesville.
When firefighters arrived, the truck was on its driver's side. It took rescue workers about 30 minutes to free the driver by cutting a hole in the roof and extracting him. Once he was free, he was loaded in to a MedCenter Air helicopter and flown to Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte.
"It did not appear that he had life-threatening injuries," Robinson said.
At the moment that the truck and trailer lost control and began tumbling down the road, a car was in the other lane heading west. The car didn't get smashed by the truck or any debris. But the driver had his window down and the car was flooded with corn. The driver went off the road into the grass. When he came to a stop, he saw that about two inches of corn had filled his vehicle, Robinson said.
The driver wasn't hurt and he was able to drive away.
Not only did the truck and trailer miss the car, they also missed the power poles and houses along its path of destruction.
A Lenoir-based cleanup company called STAT Inc. was summoned to clear the 25 tons of corn from the road and roadside. The corn filled the ditches and was up to a foot deep in some drifts on the road.
Brenda Knight was sitting on her porch when she heard the loudest boom she's heard in a long time and saw a massive cloud of smoke and dust.
She ran to check on the driver and called 911.
"We've had a lot of wrecks on this road -- this was the third one this month," Knight said. She pointed out that it could have been a whole lot worse and she looked on the lighter side. "If it gets hot enough, we might just get a little popcorn."
Copyright 2012 - Hickory Daily Record, N.C.
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
