Published Thursday, Feb. 25, 1999 Emergency workers spent most of the day carefully working to separate the tanker from the truck and remove the dangerous load.
Residents returned to their homes around 9 p.m. after the tanker was uprighted and its contents were transferred to another truck, said John Nicklin, deputy coordinator of Mercer County Emergency Management Agency.
No propane leaked from the tanker, but if it exploded, state police said, the fuel had the potential to go off like a bottle rocket and destroy everything within a half-mile radius.
"If the tanker had let go, there would have been a lot of potential for disaster," Nicklin said.
That danger sparked the evacuation and even forced the closure of the Clarks Mills Post Office. Route 358 from U.S. Route 19 to Interstate 79 was closed, along with all secondary roads leading into Clarks Mills, police said. The roads didn't open until 10:30 p.m., a PennDOT spokesman said.
Oliver Rodax, Commodore Perry school district superintendent, said afternoon school buses had to be rerouted to avoid the area.
David McCullough, Clarks Mills, was at the bank Wednesday morning when his father came in and told him he couldn't go back home.
"The state trooper flew by with his lights flashing," he said, as he relaxed in a booth at the Lakeway Restaurant in Stoneboro. "They wouldn't let me back in."
The truck, driven by Brian W. Jones, 40, of Stevensville, Ontario, was westbound on Route 358 when it went around a curve and hit a guardrail, state police said.
The trailer spun out and rolled over the guardrail and down an embankment, landing upside down about 150 feet from a home, police said. The tractor came to rest on the crushed guardrail.
Police said Jones may have taken the curve faster than the posted 20 mph.
Sheakleyville firefighters arrived on the scene shortly after 8 a.m. and removed Jones. He suffered lacerations to the face and blunt force trauma to the pelvic area. He was in stable condition at UPMC Horizon Greenville this morning, a hospital spokeswoman said.Jones, who works for Liberty Liquid, Ontario, Canada, was delivering the propane to Brownie's Oil Company in Greenville.
Sheakleyville, Hempfield Township and Sandy Lake fire departments remained on standby all day, along with Mercer County EMA and PennDOT crews.
A crane from Hawk Crane, Mercer, was brought in to move the truck, along with special equipment to offload the propane. Another tanker truck was brought in from Meadville to carry the fuel.
The crane pulled the tractor from the scene at about 6:45 p.m. while the tanker remained on its back over an embankment.
"The way it's laying now it's very difficult to offload," said Jim Thompson, director of the Mercer County EMA, Wednesday morning. "It's going to be a slow process, one step at a time."
Police said the tanker had to be set right side up for the propane to be offloaded from the bottom. Firefighters used an airbag to lift the tanker enough to put straps on it so the crane could turn it over.
If the propane had leaked, it would change into a vapor. Propane vapor leaking from a truck sparked the April 1992 fire that destroyed Bill McCandless Ford Mercury, East Lackawannock Township.
