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A stubborn attachment to the tractor’s kingpin is all that kept this flatbed trailer from overturning completely Tuesday morning near Exit 47. The cab lay on its left side, and rescue workers extracted the injured driver through the top of the cab. Photo by Dan Kegley

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Tractor-trailer overturns injuring driver, blocks I-81

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

A tractor-trailer wrecked near Exit 47 at Marion just before 9 a.m. Tuesday, injuring its driver and blocking southbound traffic for hours. At noon, traffic was backed up to the Groseclose vicinity.

The driver, Jerry Mendelson, address unknown, lost control and overturned, according to Virginia State Police Trooper T.R. Jones. A Med-Flight helicopter took him to Bristol Regional Medical Center.

The rig stripped several yards of guardrail on the right shoulder of the southbound lanes before coming to rest on its left side with the cab’s grill near an embankment. A mirror from the truck, an atlas, glass and other items lay ruined on ground plowed up by the crashing rig.

The flat-bed trailer slanted across the southbound lanes, leaning sharply and kept from falling bed-down onto the pavement by the kingpin.

A nylon-web strap was in tatters and lengths of chain and load binders that had drawn them taught lay on the pavement near the overturned rig. The load they had secured, an apparently new fork lift, skidded perhaps 50 yards farther along the pavement from the wreck site.

The guardrail gashed a ragged hole in top of the fi - berglass cab on the driver’s side. Marion Fire Department members worked for a half-hour to cut away more of the cab to release Mendelson, and rescue squad members wheeled him to the helicopter that had landed on the southbound lanes south of the wreck site.

Jones said the accident remained under investigation.