[0]
Motorists witnessed a horrifying scene on the Ridgecut this afternoon when a tractor trailer struck a pair of painters hanging off the South Crest Bridge.
The accident left one man dead, the other seriously injured.
Crew members call this a freak accident.
They say there was too much slack in a cable suspending the men over busy Interstate 24.
Workers tried to bring the men back up to the bridge, but their efforts were too late.
"I don't know, I don't know, just for me, I'm just going to go home, I'm going to have nightmares of what I've seen," says construstion crew member Bill Rinios.
Rinios will never be able to erase the memory of today's accident off the South Crest Bridge. As two of his co-workers hovered over Interstate 24, some slack in the rig gave way.
"The cable, it was too low, by the time we pulled up, the semi-truck, it had just took it over. And it pulled the other guys on the top," Rinios remembers.
Sergeant Jerri Weary with the Chattanooga Police department says, "A truck that was riding below, hit both of the construction workers throwing them back up on to the bridge."
The accident killed one man, critically injured the other and left the Seminole Equipment company in shock over its loss.
Rinios says it is the first such accident for the crew: "We been working for a while, you know, ain't never happened, I never seen anything like that happen before, you know. We be careful, and he's the first guy, you know, in all those years."
"The investigators will have to take measurements on the cable, review the cable to see if there were any deficiencies in the cable, it's just a whole lot that they have to do right now," Weary explains.
As accident reconstruction crews piece together the series of events, Rinios and his co-workers remember their lost crew member and think of his family.
Rinios remembers the fallen crew member as a "Good working man, he's been working all of his life, since 1992 with us. He finally went to Greece to see his mother, after 10 years, he went to see her... And he came back, a couple of days ago."
Rinios says the crew will not forget the friendly man who leaves behind two teenaged daughters.
"He was supposed to stay home today, and he said "eh, I'm going to come to work" and look at what happened," Rinios says sadly.
Crew members tell us OSHA will investigate the incident.
No word yet if the driver of the semi-truck will face any charges.
[1]