The permits were in order.
The route was cleared, the paperwork done.
Then the mast of a forklift riding on a lowboy trailer met the girders beneath the Beulah bridge on Wyoming’s Interstate 90.
It was at least the second time that same span had been hit by an over height load.
What a permit cannot do is measure the gap at the moment the rig rolls through.
What a permit says and what a bridge measures
An oversize permit records the dimensions a carrier has declared and the route the driver is cleared to follow. It does not physically test the load against every structure along that route. At Beulah, the driver had obtained the necessary permits to transport the oversized load beneath the bridge, according to WYDOT.
The margin at that structure was not generous. The lowboy truck and trailer carrying a forklift struck the underside girders and support braces of the bridge at Exit 205, with the mast exceeding the posted clearance height of 15 feet 11 inches and damaging several girders and braces. The maximum legal height for a load in Wyoming is 14 feet, above which a permit is required.
Wyoming’s position is that the load, not the sign, is the driver’s problem. State transportation officials say drivers are ultimately responsible for making sure their loads fit under overpasses and are liable when they hit them. Yet a veteran trucker argues that drivers are often unfairly blamed, contending the state sometimes routes semi trucks onto highways with bridges that cannot accommodate them.
The bridge that had already been through this
The span was not new to this. WYDOT noted that the Beulah interchange bridge had been subject to previous strikes, and that a $1.19 million repair contract from an earlier strike was completed in June. Roughly four months later, the second over height load came through.
A WYDOT maintenance supervisor said at least two of the bridge’s four girders were struck, causing “significant damage.” Preliminary inspection indicated the integrity of the bridge had been compromised, closing it to traffic until bridge engineers could finish a fuller inspection. WYDOT said the new damage would require additional assessment and likely extend the overall repair timeline.
A closure there is not a minor inconvenience. The overpass carries access to Sand Creek Road, the town of Beulah and the I-90 frontage road, so the detours ripple outward through a thinly served corner of northeast Wyoming.
How the numbers stack up
The sequence is documented and dated. WYDOT awarded a $1.19 million damage repair contract for the bridge at Exit 205 after a 2023 strike damaged several girders over the westbound lanes, with construction set to begin in spring and contracted for completion within 60 days of lane closures. The next strike came the evening of October 15.
Bridge strikes are common enough nationally that agencies estimate them in the thousands, with an estimated 13,000 to 18,000 occurring each year by large commercial vehicles, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Some structures collect them repeatedly: the McKinley Street bridge in Casper, with a clearance of just 11 feet, has been hit by trucks multiple times.
Drivers do not always register the contact. In one case covered here, a flatbed clipped overpasses along the New York Thruway without stopping. The failure mode is consistent: a load that cleared the yard arrives at a structure it does not fit under.
What the permit process cannot see
A permit is a planning document. It does not travel with a tape measure, and it cannot confirm that a boom, mast or cab is riding at the height the paperwork claims when the trailer reaches a specific girder. Former WYDOT executive director Luke Reiner said of bridge strikes that “there are more than anyone wishes,” and that it is the responsibility of road users “to know the dimensions of their loads.”
That places the burden on route planning rather than on the structure. Carriers are expected to identify the low points along a corridor before the wheels turn, and the posted clearance is the number the driver is meant to match against the load.
The pattern is not confined to one state. Reported here before: a comparable strike in Alaska involved an oversize load moving under permit, another case in which authorization to travel did not translate into physical clearance.
Where this leaves the bridge and the road
The bridge came back in a reduced form. WYDOT inspectors spent two days assessing the damage, determined the bridge was stable, and reopened it with controlled access: a single 14-foot lane, signals at both ends on a two minute cycle, and a posted speed limit of 20 mph.
So the agency said it would develop engineering plans for the repair, put the project out for bid, and begin work once a contract was awarded. The strike was under investigation by the Wyoming Highway Patrol, and the driver and company involved were not identified publicly.
What Beulah shows is narrower than a theory about paperwork, and harder to argue with. A span repaired once at seven figure cost was struck again within months of that work finishing, by a load taller than the sign allowed. The repair resets the structure. It does not reset the traffic passing beneath it.
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