Mildly Interesting

You need to be able to move when dumping stuff. Above a certain speed an alarm would make sense, but disabling the truck once it's up to speed is dangerous.

Or even a warning light for crying out loud.

Ya gotta move ya ca'!

No. Every couple years we get inquiries for it, but they don't want to pay to have it installed.

He might not have been fully up to speed yet. This sign is just past a weigh station (I've driven this stretch many, many times), and VDOT said he had just gone through the station. Though that doesn't answer why the bed was up. Could have bumped the switch?

:::Edit to strike through this nonsense:::I am leaning toward the other explanation of drive shaft breaking and pole vaulting the trailer into the sign.

That's a hydraulic lifter, not a driveshaft. The bed was raised and hit the sign.

If that's the case, why did they arrest the driver on reckless driving? Sounds like pure accident. Even if it was negligent maintenance, that's not the driver's fault, that's on the trailer owner. Right? (IANACDL 😄)

There is no driveshaft to the trailer axles lmao.

I have a bridge near me that gotten taken out similarly. I wonder if it was this I was assuming the driver forgot to put it back down. Driver in my case got injured and I have a couple extra miles commute for a year. Good news is the bridge is almost fixed!

Tell me you've never looked under a tractor-trailer unit without telling me you've never...

On a scale from 1 to 10, that trailer was at a Snoop Dogg.

when you see a fork in the road, pick it up.

Maybe it wanted to turn around. Busch Gardens is just 40 miles back.

You need to be able to move while dumping stuff. A beeping noise during normal operations would be so annoying, people would just figure out how to disable it.

An alarm above a certain speed would make sense, though.

You need to pull forward as you dump, but it wouldn't be hard to put in a really annoying beeper if you use anything except the first couple gears.

It would actually be easier to have a float in the wet kit hydraulic tank on the truck side that alarms when the hydraulic fluid is low.