Truck Driver Dangling Over Bridge Rescued After Hollywood-Style Crash

The footage looks like a set-piece from a Mission Impossible movie. A semi trailer is hanging almost vertically over a river far below having ploughed through the crash barriers at the side of a huge bridge. But this scene at the Ohio River is no carefully choreographed Hollywood stunt and there’s definitely no CGI involved.

The accident happened when the semi was involved in a four-vehicle crash on the George Rogers Clark Memorial Bridge connecting Louisville, Kentucky to southern Indiana. Two people still on the bridge’s road surface and hurt in the smash were taken to hospital, but an even more pressing concern was how to rescue the truck’s driver from the cab, which was fully off the side of the bridge and only being prevented from plunging into the water below by the fifth wheel connecting it to the trailer.

And unlike in the movies, this wasn’t a quick rescue. It took emergency crews 40 minutes to get their system of ropes ready so that one could rappel down to the cab. Once there, he attached the driver to a safety harness and crews on the bridge deck hauled her up to safety. AP reports that she was rescued unharmed, but taken to hospital as a precaution.

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Craig Greenburg, Mayor of Louisville, explained that the crash happened when one vehicle traveling southbound hit a stalled car in its lane then crossed into northbound traffic where it collided with the semi, which smashed through the guardrail.

The rescuer, later named as Louisville firefighter Bryce Carden, went on to appear on Good Morning America to talk about the incident, but was  keen to point out that it was a team effort.

“I played a very small piece in a large puzzle,” Carden told interviewers, stressing that it was “the guys topside and guys on the bottom who helped make it happen.”