No rules guide wreckage cleanup along Iowa roadways

IOWA CITY - For the roughly 60,000 drivers a day passing under the Dubuque Street bridge on Interstate 80, it's hard not to stare and wonder about the remains of a mangled semi that's been sitting on the shoulder, feet from westbound lanes for days.

The truck came to a halt, partially wrapped around the bridge's piers, and burst into flames on the evening of Oct. 24. The driver, whose name and condition was never released, was taken to a hospital.

After crews extinguished the flames and cleared debris enough to reopen lanes to traffic, the charred cab and trailer was marked off with orange cones, and it's sat there ever since.

'It's kind of a mess if you get up close to it,” said Jere Wissink, of Holiday Wrecker and Crane in Tiffin. 'Everything is going to have to be hauled away.”

There's no rules specifying how quickly vehicle owners have to remove wrecks along the interstate, according to the Iowa Department of Transportation.

While 10 days is on the longer end of how long it usually takes to clear a wreck, it's not the longest.

A wrecked vehicle sat in a ditch for a month while the owner 'went back and forth with the insurance company,” said Dave Erenberger, garage and operations assistant at the Iowa DOT maintenance office in Coralville.

'Usually, it would be out of there by now, but being it is from Canada, I'm sure they have more work to do to track down insurance,” Erenberger said of the trucking company that owns the semi in the Oct. 24 crash.

Wissink recalled another vehicle wreck that took six weeks to clear just west of exit 237 in Tiffin.

A Holiday crew of about 15 people, cranes, chop saws and Dumpsters came to the scene Tuesday to clean up the mess from Oct. 24, Wissink said. They will coordinate with the Iowa DOT to close lanes and will aim to get started after rush hour, he said.

It should take four or five hours, he said.

Wissink said weather, getting equipment, securing lane closures and deciding a destination for the remains can all factor into how quickly a wreck is cleared.

'We've got to do it when we have the equipment available,” Wissink said. 'There's not really a timetable.”

Cathy Cutler, a transportation planner with the Iowa DOT district 6 office in Cedar Rapids, said the goal is to remove wrecks as quickly as possible, but there's no rules for how quickly it must happen.

'There's no specific time frame to get it out by, but generally they want to do so quickly because the load is on the trailer,” Cutler said.

She added that officials don't believe there is a safety risk of debris blowing onto the interstate in this case.

Cutler said aside from the recovering the load, there isn't incentive to act quickly. In this case, the cargo - vehicle seat regulators - was destroyed by smoke and water, Wissink said.

The Iowa State Patrol is typically responsible for overseeing removal of wrecks involving passenger vehicles, while the DOT maintenance office coordinates removal of wrecks involving commercial vehicles. The DOT also will step in when lanes need to be closed as part of the cleanup.

The DOT maintenance office is also responsible for removing road kill, and they typically have crews out every day on that assignment, Erenberger said.

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