A bridge over the Mississippi River was closed by a wreck this morning. The Jackson County Sheriff’s Office Public Information Officer Mark Pape says the bridge between Sabula and Savanna, Illinois, wasn’t damaged. Pape says actually, the Savanna-Sabula Bridge isn’t closed, but the causeway on Highway 64 leading to the bridge was closed, while they cleaned up a semi accident.
Traffic between Iowa and Illinois was re-routed to bridges at Clinton and Dubuque. Surrounded by lakes and the Mississippi river, “Sabula is Iowa’s only island city,” Pape says. The causeway winds through all the waterways to that river bridge. The semi went through a guardrail and was hanging over the edge of the causeway over the river.
Rescuers pulled the driver out and sent him by boat to an ambulance that took him to a hospital in Clinton. Then they brought in a crane to drag the truck back onto solid ground. With tongue slightly in cheek, Pape says it could have been worse, as the semi was loaded with peat moss. “There could have been plutonium or something,” he says, “then the bridge would have been closed for, like, the half-life’s fifty-thousand years.”
After the wreck officials said the bridge might be open at noon. By noon, that’s not what Pape was saying. He admits, “It could be God knows when.” But with no damage to the bridge, he said the river crossing could re-open by four P.M.