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City-bound classroom crash closes road
By Sam Scott
A section of prefabricated classrooms bound for Sunnyvale School District closed a portion of southbound Highway 680 for 45 minutes on Feb. 10. A tractor trailer truck carrying the load diverged from its route and smashed into construction housing on the bottom of the Highway 242 overpass near Martinez, according to Officer Cliff Kroeger of the California Highway Patrol. The crash, reported just after 10 a.m., caused a steel beam to fall onto the freeway, closing it for almost an hour while crews cleaned up. Kroeger said no injuries were reported.
Rudy Nasol, SSD facilities director, said the $100,000 classroom section was headed to the district office for use as alternative classroom space. Students in alternative classroom programs now use space rented from the Sunnyvale Senior Center.
Nasol said the incident will delay the district's classroom addition project. The renovation's target completion date--the first week of March--already was in doubt because of recent rains, he said.
Nasol said he learned of his delivery's fate from an understated message. "The contractor left me a voice mail that they experienced some problems during the transportation of the classroom," he said.
Nasol says one of his employees who had the day off also called after seeing the crash on TV, checking to see if it was the district's classroom section.
Kroeger said the truck carrying the classroom was part of a convoy of three tractor trailer trucks carrying oversize loads. The loads' sizes and weights mandated that the drivers follow a prescribed route, he said.
The driver was operating under permit because of the size of the load, Kroeger said. "The permit actually showed that he had to go a different route. Because of that he should have bypassed the [wreck] location."
J.R. Gunter, President of Healdsburg-based G.V. Custom Modular, the classroom's builder, said the driver, Don Pellandini, had misread his directions and missed an exit. Gunter said the driver had taken the route many times before, but not with retrofitting from road construction cutting into the 15-foot clearance.
The building struck the beam at 45 mph, causing no damage to the bridge, but "shredding" the load, Kroeger said.
Gunter said damage to the classroom was limited to the roof sections. An engineer is analyzing the extent of damage to the structure, now housed on district grounds. Ordering new parts will take three to four weeks. Once the parts are received, Gunter said, the repair will be immediate.
"We're just glad no one was hurt," he said.
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
