If you're headed for a tunnel that's 13 feet tall and you're truck is 13 feet six inches, you're headed for big trouble. That small fact didn't occur to to Gilberto Cantu, a Texas truck driver, as he approached the New Jersey entrance of the Lincoln Tunnel in his rig loaded with bathtubs, toilets and plumbing fixtures.
As reported in the NY Times, Mr. Cantu drove the entire 1.5 miles of the tunnel from Weehawken, N.J., to Manhattan, tearing his way under the Hudson River in the tunnel’s center tube and peeling back the roof of his tractor-trailer as if it were a tin can. No one was injured, but an undetermined number of decorative tunnel ceiling tiles were ripped off.
It was unclear why Mr. Cantu did not heed several flashing signs and a orders to stop blasted from a loudspeaker, according to Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the tunnel. “There were enough bells and whistles going off that this should not have happened,” Mr. Coleman said. “He told the officers he didn’t know where he was going.”
Mr. Coleman said trucks were turned back for exceeding the height limit about once a week. Roy Guzman, the safety director of U.S.A. Logistics Carriers of McAllen, Tex., Mr. Cantu’s employer, said in a telephone interview that “it was just a bad call” by Mr. Cantu. “He misjudged the height of the tunnel, and once he was inside it he didn’t realize the damage he was doing.”
Mr. Cantu, of Edinburg, Tex., declined to comment. He was issued nine misdemeanor moving violations, including reckless driving, failure to obey a traffic signal and failure to obey an officer’s command. “This is going to cost us, and it’s going to cost him,” Guzman said. Whether that means Mr. Cantu will lose his job “has been discussed, but we have to wait and see until we have a talk with him,” Mr. Guzman added.
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