June 11, 2023

Section of I-95 Collapses Near Philadelphia

A tanker fire beneath the overpass melted the supports for the busy highway.

/City of Philadelphia Office of Emergency Management

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Bad news for drivers hitting the road this summer on the East Coast. On Sunday morning, a tanker fire beneath a Philadelphia overpass for I-95 caused a big section of the northbound highway to collapse, leaving at least seven miles of one of the nation’s busiest interstates closed in both directions for the foreseeable future. That section of I-95 carries as many as 160,000 vehicles a day. Its collapse cuts off drivers heading to and from DC or New York during the summer vacation season, and it had at least one Twitter user fretting about the future of the Billy Joel concert in Philly on Friday. 

“I-95 will be impacted for a long time, for a long time,” Philadelphia managing director Tumar Alexander said in a briefing Sunday.

Videos from the scene showed dramatic fires under the highway, and emergency officials warned that fuel leaking from the tanker was causing fires to erupt from nearby utility holes. 

Naturally, social media sleuths also noticed that the tanker fire occurred at an exit with some recent notoriety: It’s the turnoff to reach Four Seasons Total Landscaping, the site of Rudy Giuliani’s bizarre press conference after the 2020 presidential election, where the former president’s lawyer insisted that Joe Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania was the result of fraud. Trump had initially indicated that the campaign press conference would be held at the Four Seasons hotel, but for reasons that still remain something of a mystery, Giuliani hosted the event at the landscaping company instead.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate