On an early Sunday morning in June 2023, a tanker truck filled with gasoline skidded on an exit ramp, tumbled over, and burst into flames just below one of the nation’s busiest interstates. The inferno that followed immediately severed miles of the East Coast’s most important artery, choking off a route used by countless cars and trucks.
The fires were still burning on I-95 when Mike Carroll, Pennsylvania’s transportation secretary, told Gov. Josh Shapiro that, under the very best circumstances, he’d reopen the roadway in six weeks. Publicly, Shapiro and many experts posited that rebuilding would likely take much longer, turning a Philadelphia corridor traversed by 160,000 cars each day into a sluggish limbo, as they found other paths to and from work.
The feats that followed have since been memorialized as a legendary if unlikely triumph of American infrastructural prowess. On day two, Shapiro issued a disaster proclamation, unlocking millions of dollars in funds and waiving normal bidding and contracting processes. By day six, demolition was completed and sports bars around Philly had begun showing a 24/7 livestream of the construction site. At first, officials thought “the fix would be measured in months,” Carroll told me. But he and his department soon lowered that time table to the point where it was “measured in weeks, and then when it came into even more focus, we said measured in days.”
On the 12th day, against all odds and with a NASCAR jet dryer — the kind used to blast rain off racetracks — on standby, crews smoothed the final layer of asphalt, paving the way for I-95 to reopen to traffic less than two weeks after its catastrophic collapse…