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Weston tolls waived after truck spills beef on Pike

E-mail|Link|Comments () October 26, 2009 03:53 PM

By Andrew Ryan and Noah Bierman, Globe Staff

Bad news: A strange traffic crash early this morning on the Massachusetts Turnpike involving three tractor trailers and a car spilled thousands of pounds of beef at the eastbound entrance to the Weston tolls.

Good news: Tolls were waived for more than three hours for drivers who braved the traffic on the turnpike, which helped minimize delays and avoided making a bad situation worse.

An inspector from the USDA visited the crash site and declared that 46,549 pounds of meat from the truck has to be destroyed. The beef will burned at an incinerator in Millbury, which will is about 30 miles west on the Turnpike.

The wreck was completely cleared from the roadway just before 10 a.m., allowing officials to open all lanes and begin charging again for tolls.

Investigators are still trying to determine what exactly happened at 2:30 a.m. that caused the truck carrying sides of beef to flip on its side. At its worst, traffic backed up seven miles to the Natick service area and spilled onto alternative routes into the city, with Routes 9 and 2 handling much of the overflow, according to Arthur Burns, director of operations for SmartRoute Systems, a traffic monitoring firm.

State Police began waving drivers through the toll booth just before 6 a.m., which helped dissipate delays.

"Really it didn't seem as bad as I thought it was going to be in terms of delays," Burns said. "On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd say it was a 5 or 6. It wasn't horrible. We've had a lot worse in the past."

State Police made the decision to waive tolls, according to Colin Durrant, a spokesman for the Executive Office of Transportation.

"It's a function of public safety in an incident like this," Durrant sad.

Official did not yet have a tally of how much money the Turnpike Authority lost this morning by not charging for tolls. The truck carrying the beef was hoisted onto a platform truck and removed. Crews from the Turnpike Authority then salted and sanded the roadway to make sure it was not slippery.