Runaway Truck Ramp On US Highway 16 West Of Buffalo Retrofitted And Upgraded

Any motorist who may experience brake failure or a loss of control of their vehicle while coming down the mountain road eastward towards Buffalo, can once again go to the side of the road for some assistance in one particular area.

The runaway truck ramp on US Highway 16 about 6 miles west of Buffalo has been retrofitted, upgraded and reopened.

A little more than 2 years ago, a vehicle ended up going through the entire 10 net system on the ramp, and it was not enough to stop the vehicle from going over the edge.

The driver survived and engineers decided they needed to figure out how to make sure an incident like that does not happen again.

Laura Dalles from the Wyoming Department of Transportation, says the ramp is now a 6-gate jumbo net system, which means there are fewer nets, but the size increase of the nets makes up for it.

“They increase stopping capacity to those new nets and the energy absorbers have been upgraded as well. They rotated the energy absorbers now, the canisters where the tape comes out, so that prevents the nets from rolling underneath the vehicle.”

Dalles says the runaway truck ramp west of Buffalo has been there for a little more than 20 years, and is only 1 of 2 ramps in Wyoming.

The other is on the Teton Pass Highway between Jackson and the Idaho border.