Bad Spring For Vermont Covered Bridges And Stupid Truck Drivers

The extensively damaged covered bridge in Lyndon, Vermont.
An oversized truck barreled through the bridge in May. 

This spring was not good for Vermont's famed covered bridges. Two idiotic truckers made sure that was the case.

Back on May 16, a moronic truck driver blasted through the Millers Run bridge, built in 1878 in Lyndonville, breaking angled roof supports, damaging two main vertical beams and shattering parts of the bridge's north side.  

Police said the driver told them she was making a delivery and GPS directions said to go across the covered bridge.

As if GPS were God and she couldn't tell the truck was bigger than the bridge.

As a side note, I guess that's why truckers continually get stuck on the narrow winding Smugglers Notch pass on Route 108 in Vermont. Numerous signs tell trucks not to go up, but GPS says go, so they go. Human-created warnings be damned.

Engineering studies are going on now to figure out how to fix the bridge. The trucking company whose driver is responsible for the damage looks like they will pay for the damage.

As you can see by the video at the bottom of this post, the truck driver cruised on through, wrecking the bridge and then kept right on going, as if that was the normal thing to do.  The truck driver, Jolene Godfrey, 43, of White River Junction, was on a delivery run for Upper Valley Produce.

Just a day or two after the bridge in Lyndon was trashed another truck driver trashed another Vermont covered bridge, this one in West Woodstock. 

The truck, with a trailer carrying equipment exceed the bridge's height limit and damaged the interior of it. At least this time, the truck driver owned up to it, stopped immediately and cooperated with police.

All this is nothing new.

Last summer, another trucker damaged the Cornish-Windsor Covered Bridge over the Connecticut River on the Vermont-New Hampshire border.

Once again, it was GPS. Nizeyimana Silas, 31 at the time of Nashua, New Hampshire, drove through the bridge, which has a posted nine foot, two inch clearance, according to the Valley News. The truck is three feet taller than that.

Cornish Police Chief Doug Hackett had to tell the Valley News the obvious: "Following your GPS doesn't mean you don't have to follow posted signs. You can't use the GPS as an excuse.... At some point, you have to look at the road, look at the signs, look at what's going on around you."

Please, folks. Stop relying on your GPS. It lies to you.

Here's the video of the Lyndon bridge being damaged by the oblivious trucker: