A tractor-trailer hauling an oversized load tipped onto its side on the westbound 210 Freeway in La Crescenta on the morning of Wednesday, August 19, dropping its trailer onto a grey Mercedes sedan and pinning the car underneath. Three people were hurt and taken to area hospitals.
The wreck happened shortly before 11 a.m. just east of Pennsylvania Avenue, according to the California Highway Patrol. Two semi-trucks and a passenger car were involved. NBC Los Angeles reported that one of the big rigs caught fire. Boxes and other cargo spilled across several lanes and buried the pavement in debris.
All westbound lanes shut down. They stayed closed for more than 14 hours.
A Mercedes Ended Up Under the Trailer
The white tractor-trailer was carrying an oversized load when its trailer went over and came to rest on top of the grey Mercedes, trapping the car beneath the wreckage. That is the kind of detail that turns a normal fender bender into a rescue operation.
Helicopter cameras over the scene captured what crews were up against. Cargo was strewn across multiple freeway lanes, and the overturned rig sat directly on the pinned sedan. Boxes and other freight rolled well past the crash point, so the closure was not just about the trucks. It was about clearing an entire load off an active freeway.
California Highway Patrol officers and Los Angeles County Fire crews handled the scene together. They pulled injured people out and tried to keep traffic away from the debris field at the same time. Both semi-trucks were left damaged. A trapped occupant and cargo dumped across the lanes made this one of the messier truck wrecks the 210 has seen in a while.
Three Taken to Hospital
Los Angeles County Fire crews worked through each vehicle at the scene, checking everyone caught up in the crash.
By the afternoon, three people had been transported to local hospitals. Their conditions were not released. Given that a car spent time wedged under a trailer, the fact that the injury list stayed at three is its own kind of answer.
Fourteen Hours of Closed Lanes
CHP issued a SigAlert for all westbound lanes. If you have never heard the term, it is the Highway Patrol’s label for any unplanned event that closes a lane of traffic for 30 minutes or more. This crash blew past that minimum without breaking a sweat.
Most of the westbound side was still closed at 3 p.m. Wednesday, hours after the trucks first collided. Crews needed that long to haul away two disabled semis and sweep an entire spilled load off the pavement. To keep at least a trickle of cars moving during the day, CHP officers routed traffic through the center median, then pushed westbound drivers onto the southbound 2 Freeway.
The full reopening did not come until around 1 a.m. Thursday. Do the math and the westbound 210 sat shut for over 14 hours, running from a late-morning commute straight through the evening rush and deep into the overnight. Anyone counting on that stretch to get home Wednesday had to find another way.
A Second Big Rig Was Already Burning Down the Road
Here is the twist that made Wednesday truly brutal for Crescenta Valley drivers. The overturned trailer was not the only truck problem on the westbound 210 that morning.
About two hours earlier, shortly after 9 a.m., a separate big rig caught fire on the westbound 210 near Sunland Boulevard. The flames jumped from the truck into dry brush on a nearby hillside and forced its own SigAlert. Firefighters had to work that blaze while it climbed the slope.
The two incidents had nothing to do with each other. They just happened to hit the same freeway on the same morning, a few miles and a couple of hours apart. With one fire spreading uphill near Sunland and one overturned rig pinning a car near Pennsylvania Avenue, both crash sites got worked at the same time. Traffic across the whole corridor locked up for most of the morning, and drivers spilled off onto local off-ramps looking for any way around.
Why the 210 Gets Slammed by Truck Wrecks
This stretch of freeway is not random bad luck. The 210 runs along the floor of the Crescenta Valley, at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, and carries heavy freight between the Inland Empire and the San Fernando Valley. That means a steady flow of trucks through a hilly, curving corridor day after day. When one of those loads goes over, it goes over hard.
The geography around La Crescenta makes the fallout worse. The Crescenta Valley has a limited road network, so a full freeway closure does not just slow the 210. It dumps thousands of frustrated commuters onto narrow surface streets through La Crescenta, Montrose, and the surrounding neighborhoods that were never built to swallow that kind of overflow. Close the westbound lanes for 14 hours and the backups ripple out for miles.
This part of the Foothill Freeway has a track record with heavy trucks. In December 2013, two big rigs collided about a mile up the road, just east of Lowell Boulevard, setting one truck on fire and closing the westbound lanes overnight. In August 2020, a wrong-way head-on crash near Ocean View Boulevard killed two people and shut the eastbound side. Freight, hills, and a busy commuter corridor keep colliding at the same handful of miles.
The Cause Is Still Being Sorted Out
What actually set off the collision has not been made public. The California Highway Patrol listed the cause as under investigation, and no explanation has been released for how two semis and a passenger car ended up tangled together near Pennsylvania Avenue.
With commercial trucks, that kind of review tends to go deeper than a normal traffic stop. Investigators can pull driver logs, maintenance records, and loading paperwork to figure out whether a truck was overloaded, poorly secured, or being pushed by a driver who should not have been behind the wheel of an oversized haul. An oversized load that ends up on its side raises exactly those questions.
For now, the concrete facts are the ones you can count. Two big rigs, one passenger car, one trailer that landed on a Mercedes, three people in the hospital, and a westbound freeway that stayed dark for more than half a day. The 210 is back open. The reason it closed in the first place is still an open file.
If you drive the Foothill Freeway on a regular basis, Wednesday was a reminder of how fast that corridor can seize up. Two unrelated truck problems in one morning were enough to strand the entire Crescenta Valley for hours, and the cleanup ran until the middle of the night. When a rig full of freight goes over on that route, the whole valley pays for it.
