Curved

A truck hauling an empty nuclear waste cask gets hung up on the tricky 36

(Sept. 11, 2008) Just before noon on the Friday before Labor Day weekend, a truck carrying an empty 90,000-pound nuclear waste cask to the Humboldt Bay Power Plant came to a slow halt on a sharp curve on State Route 36.

It happened near Buck Mountain on a shoulderless, narrow, steep section of road flanked by a rising wall of rock on one side and a 75-foot chasm on the other. The big rig — 108 feet and four inches long — blocked the entire roadway, with one axle suspended in air above the chasm. And it wasn’t until more than 24 hours later, after a tricky operation involving more big rigs and a crane, that the blockage was cleared.

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The stuck truck disrupted the plans of some travelers headed for Ruth Lake to get a jump on the weekend. It also provoked ready suspicion in some of the people who live along that remote, twisty highway, for whom all it took was even a whiff of a report that this truck had something to do with something nuclear for them to want to simultaneously rush to the scene in morbid curiosity and flee the region in fear.

Steve Mendonca, who lives on Route 36, called the Journal to express his worries. “I don’t want this stuff anywhere near me,” he said.

It didn’t help that even far-distant observers were pushing the panic button.

“Has anybody checked for radioactivity in the area of the accident. Not that anybody would try to cover anything up,” wrote “BDV of Chicago” in the online comments to a Times-Standard story about the incident.

Another commenter wondered the million-dollar wonder: What was a truck — a nuke truck — more than 40 feet over the state’s 65-foot restriction for Route 36 (and 299, and part of 101) doing on that crazy stretch of roadway? “Trying to sneak in the back door?” wrote “argumentum.”

Someone else soothed that the cask was empty, and was headed to Humboldt Bay where it would stay put.

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