Crews Work To Repair I-94 After Tanker Fire; Hope To Have Freeway Reopened By Saturday
DEARBORN (WWJ) -- It has been a busy 48 hours for M-DOT repair crews along I-94 in Dearborn.
Crews poured new cement along a roughly 150-foot stretch of I-94 eastbound at Wyoming on Friday, the site of a tanker accident and fire that damaged the freeway on Wednesday.
Skip Powelson with Poco Incorporated -- one of the crews on site handling the repair -- spoke with WWJ Newsradio 950's Jon Hewett about what goes into the repair effort.
"The roadway was so bad that if they let traffic flow -- the kind of traffic the runs on 94 -- it would have torn that road up, it would have fallen apart, so they had to fix it, close it," Powelson said.
Once the newly laid cement cures, officials hope to re-open I-94 eastbound from the Southfield Freeway to I-96 sometime Saturday night.
"We were going to do a two-lane closure to allow traffic to go through on the right lane while they repaired the two left lanes, but the right lane was so badly damaged because when the tanker exploded the fuel rolled on the road and down into the sewers," Powelson said.
Dearborn Fire Chief Joseph Murray said the accident was between a car and the tanker — which crashed into the overpass and burst into flames. That caused the tanker to lose about 12,000 gallons of gas and diesel fuel, while the other vehicle flipped onto the other side of the freeway.