Oil Delivery Truck Sinks Into Roadway

By Lisa E. Crowley
BrocktonPost
BROCKTON—An Alvin Hollis oil delivery truck driver had that sinking feeling this morning.
“It was weird,” the driver said when about 25-to-35 yards after turning from Pearl Street to Conant Drive his truck shuddered and came to a halt after two of its tires sunk into the roadway.
The driver, a man in his 40’s who would not give his name, but said he was from West Bridgewater, said he thought he had a flat tire when the vehicle suddenly angled to the right.
He tried to continue forward to move toward the shoulder of the narrow residential street, but the more than 30,000 pound truck wouldn’t move.
He said because of a differential lock it wouldn’t go forward, so he tried putting the truck in reverse. It started to move, and it wasn’t until he saw chunks of pavement flying in the rear-view mirror could he see both tires on the passenger side had sunk into the road way.
A 10-to 12-foot gash shows where the truck’s tires mashed its way through the soft pavement on its way backwards.
The accident happened at about 8:30 a.m., early in the day so the delivery truck was nearly full of home heating oil.
Police called Lynch’s Towing to pull the load from its embedded tracks, but because the oil delivery truck was close to capacity, the load was too heavy for a massive tow truck.
Alvin Hollis then sent one of its empty trucks and transferred about 400 gallons of the sunken truck’s oil to the other vehicle--lightening the load and allowing it to be pulled from the newly-created ditch.
A Brockton Police officer on the scene said the roadway does not have any weight restrictions and noted after checking the truck’s weight, about 36,000, it was not overloaded and was not of unusual weight for a home oil delivery truck.