Commuters deal with traffic jam on 220 after truck accident

By Candice Nelson
WSLS10 Reporter
Published: July 24, 2008

Route 220 is back open after an accident shut down lanes for hours on Thursday morning. It happened around 6 a.m. when a truck hauling explosives and acetic acid overturned. And while police investigate what went wrong, drivers dealt with detours and delays.

Traffic wasn’t going anywhere and commuters could only think about where they needed to be.

“Just trying to get to Vinton,” same James Arrington.

“Going from Martinsville to Bristol, Virginia,” said another commuter.

And when they did start moving, it was more like crawling through detours on Naff Road and Buck Mountain Road.

The traffic jam affected one man’s entire schedule. As a Frito-Lay truck pulled into the Shell gas station in Boones Mill, Stephen Price said this was supposed to be one of his first deliveries.

“I had a detour, but the detour was even blocked off as well, so I had to keep going back up towards Cave Springs. This ended up being my last two stops,” said Price.

Around noon, he was delivering to the same gas station that also saw traffic backed up all the way into Boones Mill. It made for an extra busy morning for the workers.

“Big groups of people talking to each other and getting coffee, we did good on the coffee,” said Sue Yopp, manager of the Stop-In Food Store at the Shell station.

And they also made money on gas.

“One lady said she thought she was gonna run out of gas is the reason she came back here to get gas,” said Yopp.

It may have put a damper on many people’s day, but Price said it’s just part of the business, driving from place to place.

“I’ve been doing it about eight or nine years, so it happens several times. You just gotta figure a way around it,” Price said.

Even if it took him and many of you hours to get back on track.