Video

A crane collapsed on I-75 and a car drove through it. Watch »

Video

Project Manager Pat Curtis takes us behind the scenes of the iRox I-75 project. Watch »

STORY TOOLS

• E-mail story
• iPod friendly
• Printer friendly

RELATED STORIES

• I-75 stays 70 mph after crane accident
• Tom Hanson: Where’s the refrain after I-75 crane mishap?

More Bonita

• Edison State College hopes to provide students with more opportunities under new name
• In the Know: Sexiest crowd in Southwest Florida
• Lee Sheriff Mike Scott sets new record despite low turnout at polls

Share and Enjoy [?]

Yesenia Rives was tooling down Interstate 75 in Estero on Wednesday, weighing a trip to the beach, when a construction crane teetered, swayed and crashed to the roadway right before her.

“I had like 10 seconds to react” — or maybe less, the 17-year-old Naples girl later recalled.

As the construction workers ran away, Rives’ Honda Civic plowed through the fallen crane, ripping a hole through its lattice of metal.

“I had my eyes open,” Rives said. “I remember that sound, that crushing metal sound. It’s still in my head.”

Officials struggled through the afternoon Wednesday to account for the sudden collapse of a crane used to carry concrete pilings for an overpass near Corkscrew Road — part of the ongoing iROX interstate-widening project. Drivers were held up for almost two hours as authorities closed the southbound side to clean up debris.

But for all their terror, careening through the fallen metal cage, Rives and her friend Courtney Travis walked away with a mere scratch.

“We survived, it’s crazy,” Rives, a Beacon High School senior, said. “If I would have been going just a little bit faster ... it would have landed on me.”

She spoke mid-afternoon, heading home from North Collier Hospital with her dad.

They did not take the interstate.

The crane collapsed about 12:30 p.m. just south of Corkscrew Road, the Florida Highway Patrol reported. Workers were planning to use it to drive pilings over Monty Run Creek; after it fell, pieces of the crane lay on the pavement, mangled by the Honda.

As the workers cut the crane in half so they could remove it, authorities steered southbound traffic off the interstate toward U.S. 41 and back on at Bonita Beach Road. According to FHP, the southbound side had reopened by 2:30 p.m. and traffic, which had stacked up north of Alico Road, was getting back to normal.

IROX Public Information Officer David Parks said the crane is owned by the project’s bridge developer, Leware Construction of Leesburg. Both iROX and Leware will investigate the incident, Parks said, but the project isn’t expected to be delayed because of it.

As he spoke at the scene, workers set up barriers around the bridge and dismantled the downed crane.

“They have a lot of equipment out there on the interstate,” Parks said of Leware. He did not know if the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration would launch a separate inquiry.

Wednesday’s incident came on the heels of several other high-profile crane collapses around the country, including one in March in New York City that killed seven people.

Brad Closson, a California-based expert in crane safety, said one possibility in the Estero case is that the crane’s brakes gave out, sending the boom to the ground.

“It’d be kind of like you parking your car on a hill,” he said. “The boom is at an angle, so it’s always on a hill and gravity is always pulling it down.” If the brakes aren’t in good shape or aren’t properly set, he said, then gravity can tug the boom downward, “and eventually it’ll just end up on the ground.”

It’s a very different scenario from what happened in New York, he said, which involved a tower crane that used electricity.

Based on photos of the scene in Estero, Closson figured the collapsed crane here was mobile, perhaps sitting on a truck body, and ran on diesel fuel.

Either way, he said, you have to be over 18 to operate a crane — but beyond that, he called the federal regulations that cover cranes outdated.

While collapses have made the news more often in the last couple months, Closson pointed out that thousands of cranes are used every day around the country.

“I don’t think you have to be scared about them,” he said, but “it’s like anything else, any piece of heavy equipment: When you’re around it, take charge of your own safety. If you don’t have to be there, don’t be there.”

“I think this was an unfortunate, random occurrence, but it does reinforce the need for drivers in the 30-mile work zone to pay attention,” Parks, of the iROX project, said. “To make sure they are keeping enough room between themselves and the car in front of them.”

As for Rives, she allowed she’s “a little scared” to get behind the wheel again.

But before she was ferried to the hospital, the teen paused to snap photos with her cell phone of the crane and her car.

“Come on, I lived through it, I have to show people I went through a crane,” she said. “The chances of that happening is crazy.”