A 120-tonne bridge has fallen from a crane with pieces of rubble falling onto the street and squashing a truck below.
The incident took place in Regent Street, Leeds as contractors worked on the A64 bridge replacement works that will see a new £31 million flyover established in the city centre.
It’s understood the enormous structure was being moved by a crane when it came hurtling to the ground and destroyed a large vehicle below.
According to Leeds City Council, a piece of the concrete bridge had been securely installed onto a heavy load trailer, but a malfunction caused it to shift from its resting position.
The Regent Street Inner Ring Road had been closed since yesterday evening for bridge demolition works, and an onlooker revealed to LeedsLive that a 120-tonne section of the A64 bridge replacement had just fallen on a truck from the crane.
The works were expected to last the next four weekends, until 5.30 am on Monday, June 7.
The Inner Ring Road site was set to reopen on Monday, but images from this morning show the area has been fenced off.
In a statement posted this morning, Leeds City Council said that essential work to demolish and reconstruct the northern section of Regent Street Flyover was currently ongoing, and that last night, a concrete section of the demolished bridge was being hoisted onto a specialist trailer to be disposed of and recycled away from the site.
Leeds City Council said it was safely installed onto a heavy load vehicle, however, there was a failure of the trailer, causing a piece of the bridge to move from its resting position, and that it’s now being broken up for safe removal and will be cleared from the site by lunchtime today.
The council has also since established there were no injuries as a result of this incident.
Work on the Leeds Regent Street flyover project, which is expected to cost £31 million, started last May and is expected to last two years.
As part of the upgrade scheme, the 60-year-old bridge that supports the A64 Inner Ring Road over the A61 Regent Street will need to be demolished.
I just hope this work isn’t being carried out by the Trotters because I’d hate to let them take my chandeliers down for cleaning! And you would think that in today’s health and safety this kind of thing shouldn’t be happening.
Leeds is like the city that time forgot, and now it’s like living in downtown Moscow it’s become that grey.
Of course, the crane driver will blame the faulty trailer, the trailer owner will blame the crane driver, and their lawyers will be grinning and rubbing their hands together, but it’s also always a good idea not to be under anything that’s lifting a crane because there have been loads of crane failures, and it makes perfect sense to not be in the way at the time.
Perhaps we should have had Steptoe & Son on this because they would have had that on the cart and in the back yard in a jiffy, and is this going to be the new normal now with the state the construction industry is in.
From the cheap labour to the clowns in the offices, who’ve never worked in the field, straight out of college and haven’t got a clue how to plan the work. All they know is how to delay or stop it.
It was only a matter of time before an incident like this transpired, with councils having used lockdowns and COVID restrictions as an excuse to push construction work on their costly vanity projects, with work frequently being rushed to fit into ever-changing windows between more and fewer restrictions.
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