As you wander the Internet, you have perhaps happened upon videos of the infamous 11-foot-8-inch bridge in Durham, North Carolina. That's a bit lower than most bridges and as a result, there's a crash there every few weeks. An awful lot of truck drivers who don't pay attention to warning signs wind up shearing the tops of their trucks off as they innocently try to pass beneath it. Whole trucks have been destroyed.
A gent named Jürgen Henn who works in the area saw so many trucks decapitated there that he set up a couple of cameras to record each accident. He posts videos of 'em to YouTube and on a website he runs that's devoted to the bridge. In this post a few years ago, I linked to a short documentary on the bridge and you can see several dozen of the crashes in the video below…
Well now. Late last year, someone finally did something about this problem. As you'll see in the videos below, engineers managed to jack the bridge up, build up its structure, regrade the railroad tracks…and the result is that the 11'8" bridge is now 12'4". This is the same process they used in the Rambo movies to raise Sylvester Stallone.
So does that mean no more crashes? Well, so far, no big ones. But on November 26, which was 22 days after the new height was open for business, this happened and there have been a few more like it since then…