June 11, 2023

Section of I-95 Collapses Near Philadelphia

A tanker fire beneath the overpass melted the supports for the busy highway.

/City of Philadelphia Office of Emergency Management

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Bad news for drivers hitting the road this summer on the East Coast. On Sunday morning, a tanker fire beneath a Philadelphia overpass for I-95 caused a big section of the northbound highway to collapse, leaving at least seven miles of one of the nation’s busiest interstates closed in both directions for the foreseeable future. That section of I-95 carries as many as 160,000 vehicles a day. Its collapse cuts off drivers heading to and from DC or New York during the summer vacation season, and it had at least one Twitter user fretting about the future of the Billy Joel concert in Philly on Friday. 

“I-95 will be impacted for a long time, for a long time,” Philadelphia managing director Tumar Alexander said in a briefing Sunday.

Videos from the scene showed dramatic fires under the highway, and emergency officials warned that fuel leaking from the tanker was causing fires to erupt from nearby utility holes. 

Naturally, social media sleuths also noticed that the tanker fire occurred at an exit with some recent notoriety: It’s the turnoff to reach Four Seasons Total Landscaping, the site of Rudy Giuliani’s bizarre press conference after the 2020 presidential election, where the former president’s lawyer insisted that Joe Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania was the result of fraud. Trump had initially indicated that the campaign press conference would be held at the Four Seasons hotel, but for reasons that still remain something of a mystery, Giuliani hosted the event at the landscaping company instead.

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It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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