Allentown, PA – A New Jersey trucker is dead after police say a section of electrical conduit fell from a Pennsylvania Turnpike tunnel, crashed through his windshield and struck him in the head.
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State police said Thursday the truck driven by 70-year-old Howard Sexton III of East Greenwich Township continued on for a mile after the accident about 6 p.m. Wednesday inside the Lehigh Tunnel’s southbound lanes.
Police say Sexton was already dead when troopers and turnpike maintenance workers reached his truck on the shoulder of the highway.
Traffic is moving in both directions in the northbound lanes of the turnpike’s Northeast Extension. The southbound lanes are closed.
A turnpike spokesman says it’s the only tunnel in the system in which electrical conduit is directly above drivers. In older tunnels, the pipes are located in a parallel maintenance tunnel.
I drove through four tunnels on the PA Turnpike last summer; all of them looked as if they needed maintenance, as they didn’t look very well maintained.A shanda since the tolls on the PA Turnpike are high, and they keep increasing them every year.