The toll has been tallied from an incident in downtown Mount Airy which caused major damage to utility poles, electrical equipment and parked vehicles after a tractor-trailer struck an overhead power line.
“This has been something else,” Capt. Barry VanHoy of the Mount Airy Police Department said Friday afternoon of efforts to calculate the devastation from the bizarre incident Wednesday afternoon in the area of Moore Avenue and City Hall Street.
“I just have got the report from the officer,” VanHoy said of the department member who investigated the chain-reaction accident that spanned the length of the two city streets, leaving five broken poles and other destruction in its wake.
The accident report, by Officer R.G. Boles, covers 10 pages and lists total estimated damages from the incident of $233,500.
It occurred shortly after 2 p.m. Wednesday as a 2019 Freightliner truck operated by John Eric Gray, 47, of Covington Estates Road, Pilot Mountain, was pulling away from Sarah’s Beauty Boutique at 150 Moore Ave. after a delivery.
As the rig — with a gross weight of 72,000 pounds — headed north on City Hall Street, which runs perpendicular to Moore, it struck an overhead utility line that was caught by the top left corner of the front of the trailer.
With the line still snagged on the trailer, the truck continued north, causing the five utility poles connected to the line along the two streets to break, the accident report continues. As a result, both poles and lines toppled onto multiple vehicles.
As the poles fell, the transformers on two of them struck the ground and burst, splashing oil on three of the vehicles. One pole on Moore Avenue landed on a 2014 Kia owned by Randy Eugene Goins of Pinnacle, causing major damage listed as $10,000.
In all, five parked vehicles were impacted, also including a 2015 Lexus and a 2010 Lexus owned by John and Bobbie Collins of Mount Airy, who are associated with Homestead Realty; the 2017 Subaru of Angela Leonard Cagel of Cana, Virginia; and a 2015 Toyota owned by Kirk Ray Killon of Mount Airy.
Duke Energy suffered the biggest losses, put at more than $200,000, with the city of Mount Airy also affected to the tune of $5,000 in damage to a traffic light controller.
“The contributory circumstance he has for the driver of the truck is inattention,” VanHoy said of the findings by Boles.
“Of course, there were no charges,” he added, “and that’s our policy.”
VanHoy was referring to a departmental procedure that Police Chief Dale Watson has described as simply determining contributory negligence in traffic accidents unless some aggravating factor such as impaired driving is involved.
The two streets were closed in the aftermath of the incident to allow crews from Duke Energy and Pike Electric to clear the roadways and make repairs, which continued for a lengthy period.
Source: https://www.mtairynews.com