Plane Landing, Chemical Spill Frustrate Freeway Drivers

To commuters on San Fernando Valley freeways, Thursday offered both frustration and a spectacular sight.

Thousands of motorists driving north on the San Diego Freeway were delayed because of a chemical spill that closed two lanes for more than six hours. On the Foothill Freeway, traffic was temporarily snarled when a small plane lost power over Sylmar and the pilot made an emergency landing in the fast lane.

“You could say it was not one of our better days on the freeways,” California Highway Patrol spokesman Dan Loughrey said Thursday evening. “Getting home is a problem.”

It took a team from the California Department of Transportation until 8:45 p.m. to clean up a load of sodium sulfate that was spilled at 2:22 p.m., clogging traffic from just north of the Nordhoff Street off-ramp in Sepulveda to well south of the Sepulveda Pass, Loughrey said.

Ten 25-pound bags of the powdery chemical, considered dangerous if it is inhaled or contacts the eyes, fell off the back of a truck and burst open, Loughrey said. No one was injured.

As traffic ground to a stop because of the spill, 63-year-old Bucky Bryan of Mill Valley was pondering where to land his Cessna 210 after its engine gave out over the Foothill Freeway.

Although the San Fernando Airport was only about a mile away, Bryan said, his plane was losing altitude too quickly to reach it. The fast lane of the freeway looked like his best bet for a safe landing, he said.

Guiding the small aircraft under a pedestrian overpass, he landed in the southbound lanes and skidded to a stop just south of the Hubbard Street off-ramp as rush-hour traffic whizzed by, causing no injuries and only slight damage to the plane, California Highway Patrol Officer Jim Kerr said. Bryan said he left his landing gear up to avoid rolling into traffic.

“You could say it was a pretty spectacular landing. . . . He came right in over a tractor trailer,” Kerr said.

But to Bryan, a retired aircraft accident investigator who has been flying more than 40 years, the freeway landing “was nothing to really get excited about.”

“I’ve been in worse ones than this,” Bryan said as he leaned against the freeway’s center divider, sipping a soft drink and smoking a cigarette. “I was just trying to avoid traffic, didn’t want to clip a car or anything like that.”

Bryan said he has had to make “plenty” of emergency landings in his lifetime, primarily during World War II while flying rescue missions in the South Pacific.

About 8 p.m. officials towed the plane off the freeway and reopened all lanes.