Anyone planning to travel through eastern Ohio on Wednesday or Thursday, take heed: Your trip could be delayed by a massive traffic jam.
By massive, think of a trailer hogging both lanes of the highway so that no one can pass, chugging down the road hauling the equivalent of three blue whales, and you get a pretty good idea of what’s to come.
Instead of three blue whales, however, McTyre Trucking Co. from Orlando will be hauling a generator, manufactured by the Siemens company, formerly Rolls-Royce, in Mount Vernon.
The generator was bought by BP, and will be trucked from Mount Vernon to the Ohio River, then shipped to its ultimate destination atop an oil platform in the middle of the Caspian Sea north of Iran.
The overland load will weigh 959,000 pounds and be 330 feet long. But more important, it will be 20 feet, 4 inches wide, meaning it will, in essence, be a rolling roadblock.
The superload, as permitted by the Ohio Department of Transportation, will begin its journey at 9 a.m. Wednesday at the Siemens plant in Mount Vernon. It will travel east on Rt. 36 through Knox and Coshocton counties to Newcomerstown, where it will pick up I-77 and travel south to Cambridge.
From there, it will enter I-70 east to Bridgeport, then jog a few miles south on Rt. 7 to the Bellaire Harbor Service.
Four State Highway Patrol cars will accompany the massive haul, as will a service vehicle, ready to attend to any mechanical failure.
The trip is expected to take two days, traveling only during daylight. Speeds could reach 35 mph on the state routes, and perhaps 50 mph on the interstates.
If traffic gets too backed up, it’s possible the heavy caravan could find a spot to pull over and allow vehicles to pass for a time.
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