Man Not Pleased After His Windshield Was Cracked By Flying Piece Of Metal As He Drove Along Kennedy Expressway Near Downtown
CHICAGO (CBS) -- A man was driving up Interstate 90/94 when whack! A piece of metal cracked his windshield.
Walt Rivers said it happened at a construction site near the Jane Byrne Interchange, where the expressway changes names from the Kennedy Expressway to the Dan Ryan Expressway. And he told CBS 2's Tim McNicholas more needs to be done to keep drivers safe.
Rivers said he was trying to get to his friend's funeral. He did not plan for a pit stop parked on the side of the expressway with a cracked windshield.
"Probably if I was going 20 miles an hour faster, it could have been fatal if it would have come through the windshield all the way and struck me," Rivers said.
He was driving north through the construction zone on July 3. He said the metal seemed to come out of nowhere as he drove by an underpass just south of Van Buren Street.
Rivers said it either fell from overhead or was kicked up by someone else's tires. Either way, it should not have been there.
"My initial reaction was, what the you-know-what?" he said, "and a little bit of disgust that the safety wasn't there; safety measures weren't taken to prevent that."
An infrastructure professor with the Illinois Institute of Technology told us it appears to be a construction bolt of some kind. We reached out to multiple companies contracted in the area to ask if they knew where it came from, and we were awaiting their answers Friday morning.
Rivers managed to pull over near the Madison Street exit, where he found other pieces of metal on the side of the road.
"Monkey wrench, pipes," he said.
There is no telling where those came from.
On Thursday, we found a metal piece near the Madison Street exit on the Kennedy, which looked like it could be the hook from a tire jack.
Wherever the metal pieces are coming from, Rivers wants the Illinois Department of Transportation to keep it clear so no one else gets hit by debris.
"Metal scraps and stuff all over the side of the road – it's, you know, the maintenance and safety factors seem to be overlooked here," Rivers said.
