Tanker truck crash on Florida Turnpike kills driver, snarls Miami-Dade traffic

A tanker truck driver was killed Thursday when his rig overturned on Florida’s Turnpike near Bird Road in southwest Miami-Dade, shutting down lanes on one of the county’s busiest commuter routes. All lanes near the scene were temporarily blocked as emergency crews and investigators worked the crash site, leaving drivers facing major delays and detours across the western side of Miami-Dade County.

Florida Highway Patrol first responded to a vehicle crash with injuries in the southbound lanes before 10:30 a.m. Later details placed the truck heading north at 10:36 a.m. when the driver lost control, overturned and slammed into the center median concrete barrier. Local reports described the wreck as fiery, and the truck was identified as a tanker truck, with one report calling it a septic tank truck. The cargo itself was not identified in the available information.

By Thursday afternoon, northbound lanes had reopened. The Turnpike reopened by 4 p.m., according to Florida Department of Transportation traffic information, but delays continued for much of the day for commuters moving through southwest Miami-Dade and for drivers using Bird Road as a connector between the county’s western communities and the rest of the region.

The death also adds another fatal crash to the Bird Road stretch of the Turnpike, a corridor that has already seen serious wrecks. A wrong-way crash near the same exit killed two people and injured two others, underscoring how quickly a high-speed roadway in southwest Miami-Dade can become a public-safety problem far beyond a single collision. The latest rollover will keep attention on Florida Highway Patrol’s findings and on whether transportation officials plan any changes to the way traffic, barriers and crash response are handled at the Bird Road interchange.