M50 - Beware of bridge/falling objects

Vertakill

I'll just try give the approx area of where this incident happened. About 45 minutes ago I was driving back from my lunch break into work. Heading from Leixlip toward Ballymount. The bridge in question is, I believe, the Red Cow bridge (traffic merges just underneath bridge from Red Cow area).

Now, to get an image of this, it was pissing rain (wipers on max speed) and there was a touch of wind. Drove underneath this bridge in the middle lane, out of the 3, at about 60-70mph when a large hand railing from above dropped a few feet in front of the car.

This was a standard enough railing. 3 horizontal bars (about 1-2 metres long) with 2 vertical bars on either end - so basically a single handrail section in a rectangle style shape. I'd say this thing weighed a bit by the way it hit the ground (guessing about 10 stone?).

I was very lucky with a few things. It landed about a second in front of me and the way it landed meant it was length-ways, rather than width-ways, so I had enough room to edge around it. The other lucky thing was there was nobody to my immediate left/right/behind.

If I was a second or two quicker, judging by the way it landed (right on it's corner) it would've gone straight through the bonnet or windscreen.

I was on the phone as soon as I got a chance and had someone ring up the m50 maintenance people because it's a gray'ish colour on a very dark and rainy day, so people might run over that without seeing it and it'd go straight up through the bottom of your engine with no trouble.

So just keep an eye out when going around these bridges if they're under construction!