Article Image and Credit(s): This image provided by the Office of Emergency Management shows firefighters standing near the collapsed part of I-95 in Philadelphia, Sunday, June 11, 2023. The elevated section of Interstate 95 has collapsed early Sunday after a vehicle caught fire, closing the main north-south highway on the East Coast and threatening to upend travel in parts of the densely populated Northeast. (Office of Emergency Management via AP)
Transportation officials warned of extensive delays and street closures and urged drivers to avoid the area in the city’s northeast corner. Officials said the tanker contained a petroleum product that may have been hundreds of gallons of gasoline. The fire took about an hour to get under control.
The northbound lanes of I-95 were gone and the southbound lanes were “compromised” by heat from the fire, said Derek Bowmer, battalion chief of the Philadelphia Fire Department. Runoff from the fire or perhaps broken gas lines caused explosions underground, he added.
Some kind of crash happened on a ramp underneath northbound I-95 around 6:15 a.m., said state Transportation Department spokesman Brad Rudolph, and the northbound section above the fire collapsed quickly. The southbound lanes were heavily damaged, “and we are assessing that now,” Rudolph said.
Video from the scene showed a massive concrete slab had fallen from I-95 onto the road below. Shapiro said his flight over the area showed “just remarkable devastation.”
He saw traffic in his rearview mirror come to a halt. Soon after, the northbound lanes of the highway crumbled. “It was crazy timing,” Fusetti said. “For it to buckle and collapse that quickly, it’s pretty remarkable.” The collapsed section of I-95 was part of a $212 million reconstruction project that wrapped up four years ago, Rudolph said. There was no immediate time frame for reopening the highway, but officials would consider “a fill-in situation or a temporary structure” to accelerate the effort, he said.
Motorists were sent on a 43-mile (69-kilometer) detour, which was going “better than it would do on a weekday,” Rudolph said. The fact that the collapse happened on a Sunday helped ease congestion, but he expected traffic “to back up significantly on all the detour areas.”
Shapiro said he had been spoken directly to U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and had been assured that there would be “absolutely no delay” in getting federal funds quickly to rebuild what he called a “critical roadway” as safely and efficiently as possible.
But Shapiro he said the complete rebuild of I-95 would take “some number of months,” and in the meantime officials were looking at “interim solutions to connect both sides of I-95 to get traffic through the area.” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a Twitter post that President Joe Biden was briefed on the collapse and that White House officials were in contact with Shapiro and Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney’s offices to offer assistance. Buttigieg, in a social media post, called it “a major artery for people and goods” and said the closure would have “significant impacts on the city and region until reconstruction and recovery are complete.”
The National Transportation Safety Board said it was sending a team to investigate the fire and collapse.
Most drivers traveling the I-95 corridor between Delaware and New York City use the New Jersey Turnpike rather than the segment of interstate where the collapse occurred. Until 2018, drivers did not have a direct highway connection between I-95 in Pennsylvania and I-95 in New Jersey. They had to use a few miles of surface roads, with traffic lights, to get from one to the other.
“As far as waterways go, it’s being contained, and it seems like things are under control,” he said. Thousands of tons of steel and concrete were piled atop the site of the fire, and heavy construction equipment would be required to start to remove the debris, said Dominick Mireles, director of Philadelphia’s Office of Emergency Management.
The fire was strikingly similar to another blaze in Philadelphia in March 1996, when an illegal tire dump under I-95 caught fire, melting guard rails and buckling the pavement.
The highway was closed for several weeks, and partial closures lasted for six months. Seven teenagers were charged with arson. The dump’s owner was sentenced to seven to 14 years in prison and ordered to pay $3 million of the $6.5 million repair costs, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
More recently in Atlanta, an elevated portion of Interstate 85 collapsed in a fire, shutting down the heavily traveled route through the heart of the city in March 2017. A homeless man was accused of starting the blaze. But federal investigators said in a report that the state transportation department’s practice of storing combustible construction materials under the highway increased the risk of fire.
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Associated Press writers Mark Scolforo in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Jake Offenhartz in New York contributed to this report.