ELKIN — A Saturday morning accident on Interstate 77 backed up traffic in the Elkin area.
John Shelton, county emergency services director, said a large Ryder rental truck headed north ran off the highway near mile marker 87 (two miles north of the C.C. Camp Road exit).
The truck hit a tree and flipped over onto its right side, said Shelton. EMS got the call at 8:24 a.m.
The driver, Gerald Saldana, 39, of Fayetteville, Georgia, was conscious and alert on the scene when treated by paramedics, according to Shelton. However, he was in pain from what might have been a broken leg.
There were no other cars involved, and the driver didn’t have any medical crisis that caused the wreck, said Shelton. He may have dozed off at the wheel, the EMS director guessed.
The EMS transferred Saldana to nearby Hugh Chatham Memorial Hospital for treatment.
The driver was worried about the contents of his truck, said Shelton. The Ryder was full of computer equipment. The truck was badly damaged, and a lot of the equipment looked damaged, too, he said.
The accident caused one lane of northbound I-77 to be closed for a couple of hours. Briefly, both lanes were closed so that the truck could be flipped upright and pulled back onto the roadway for removal.