ST. GEORGE — A load of construction screws that likely fell off of a truck near the Southern Parkway exit of northbound Interstate 15 created havoc for possibly hundreds of motorists and tire repair shops that were inundated with the resulting repair orders.
Since Thursday, St. George News has received multiple emails, each describing an incident on northbound I-15 near the Southern Parkway exit involving large construction screws littering the onramp of the interstate. The Utah Highway Patrol indicated this likely resulted from a truck losing a box or load of screws that hit the roadway and burst open.
Vickie Silva wrote in an email that multiple cars were affected, and the fallout from the damage was extensive and “surprising.”
Silva, who had two vehicles affected after the tires on both had to either be repaired or replaced, also cited a number of messages posted on the “NextDoor” app. Users posted messages describing both long wait times at area tire stores to schedule repairs and the extent of the damage left in the wake of the incident.
Utah Highway Patrol Sgt. Cameron Roden confirmed that emergency dispatch received as many as 15 calls from motorists reporting damage after running over large construction-type screws that punctured their tires.
“We never did locate the vehicle that lost the load of screws,” Roden added.
Roden added that the load of screws likely fell off the back of a truck, and if it was a construction crew, then they might not have even known they lost the box or boxes of screws, since many times they are hauling multiple containers of screws to a job site.
“If it’s like a contractor and the screws tumble out of his truck, then he may not even be aware they had lost anything,” Roden added.
St. George News also contacted several tire stores in the area, including Russell Todd at Sunrise Tire. He said starting Wednesday, they received multiple calls for tire repairs, and the shop scheduled 20 tire repairs. On Thursday, they saw another 15-20 vehicles that had to have their tires repaired or replaced. And by Friday, he said, there were two cars still at the shop awaiting tire replacements.
“Most of the people knew where the screws came from and were talking about the Southern Parkway exit,” Todd added.
He said the timing made it difficult since so many cars were affected in such a short space of time, leaving crews to work “very quickly to try and get these vehicles back on the road.” Most of the tires had to be replaced, due to the number of punctures in each of the tires, Todd said.
The cost can be extensive as well – as much as $1,500 if all four tires have to be replaced, which was the case with several of the vehicles, Todd added.
One sales representative at Big O Tires told St. George News the shop saw an influx of customers and extensive wait times as well starting on Wednesday, and the shop still is working to clear the backlog of cars that require tire repairs. In a majority of the cases, the tires had multiple puncture points and had to be replaced.
Not only did the number of tire repair orders increase, but the number of screws found in each of the tires was also something shops do not see every day. In fact, every vehicle that came in for repairs had multiple screws in each of the tires – as many as 24 in a single tire.
Samuel Haroldsen from Discount Tire in St. George also had an influx of tire repair orders over the course of the last three days, he said, and each of the tires repaired was punctured by the same type of screw.
“The same type of screw punctured each of the tires we replaced or repaired,” he said. “They were identical.”
Haroldsen said that since Wednesday, the shop has completed at least 40 replacements or repairs, and more often than not, he said, the tires had to be replaced, due to the number of screws technicians were finding in a single tire – up to a dozen, he said.
He also said hundreds of vehicles likely were affected, taking into account the number of tire stores locally that were inundated with repair orders.
There was an estimated 80 to more than 100 tire repair customers between each of the three tire shops contacted by St. George News, which does not account for the 30-40 tire stores located in St. George alone – not including the big-box retailers like Walmart.
Following the multiple calls to UHP dispatch center reporting the incident, Roden said the Utah Department of Transportation was notified of the situation on Wednesday and sent out a road crew that ran a large magnet with wheels across the surface of the roadway to remove any nails that remained on the roadway.
The following day, he said, UDOT activated a street sweeper to remove any remaining screws missed by the magnet.
Roden said the calls received by emergency dispatch were confined to tire damage, and no crashes or injuries associated with the debris-related incident were reported.
This report is based on statements from court records, police or other responders and may not contain the full scope of findings. Persons arrested or charged are presumed innocent until found guilty in a court of law or as otherwise decided by a trier-of-fact.
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