A concrete chunk of the Seventh Street Southwest overpass Wednesday fell onto a vehicle traveling on the highway below, holding up the morning rush-hour traffic for tens of thousands of commuters.
The vehicle’s windshield was cracked by the plunging rock, about the size of a deflated football, but the driver was not injured, according to officials with the D.C. Department of Transportation and Fire and Emergency Medical Services.
The 7:45 a.m. incident on the westbound Southeast-Southwest Freeway gridlocked traffic throughout Southeast D.C., including Interstate 295 and South Capitol Street. The left lane of the freeway was blocked for nearly five hours as DDOT crews performed temporary repairs on the overpass.
The Seventh Street overpass, which leads drivers into L’Enfant Plaza, is one of 241 bridges and overpasses in the District overseen by DDOT. Scheduled renovations on the bridge, planned long before the incident Wednesday, are expected to get under way in the next week, DDOT spokesman Erik Linden said.
The department “will be redoubling our efforts to do a citywide inspection” of the city’s bridges and overpasses, “to ensure this doesn’t happen again,” Linden said. The falling concrete “was a real anomaly,” he said, and drivers “can rest assured that the bridges and overpasses above you are in goodshape.”
