Big Rigs Still Traveling on Route 115 North | News

A truck driver drove right past our camera on a road he should have never been on.

Just a few hours earlier, state police pulled over another truck driver, who ignored six signs telling him to keep his big rig off of northbound Route 115.

The driver received a $700 ticket. Apparently, some truck drivers are not paying attention to these signs that spell out which vehicles are banned from coming down the steep hill.

In the last three weeks, three of them crashed at the bottom.

And four years ago, Henry Gfroehrer says he was nearly killed. While driving his furniture truck, an out of control tractor trailer slammed into him. Earlier this week, he won a multi-million dollar lawsuit against that trucking company.

"If anybody can do anything just if you have to hire or pay a police officer make sure no trucks go down the road or maybe put a turnaround there. They don`t have to go down the road. Something has to be changed. Someone is going to wind up getting killed over there," said Gfroehrer.

"You got 80,000 pounds that`s coming down the mountain. When it hits something, it`s going to explode. And that`s what we had happen in our case, and that`s what we saw with the four incidents over the last 40 days," said Ed Ciarimboli, Gfroehrer's attorney.

Some people who work just down the road from where the crashes happened say they`re worried someone`s going to get killed.

"They could kill somebody and not even think twice about it. Can you live with yourself if you killed somebody? Knowing that you came down the hill and weren`t supposed to and your brakes give out? Can you live with yourself if you actually kill somebody," said Helen Totten, an employee at the Exxon Subway.

The trooper who pulled over the truck this morning told Newswatch 16 they routinely patrol the mountain in unmarked cars, looking for illegal tractor trailers.

PennDOT says the truck drivers need to pay attention to the signs, and the area needs to be patroled.