Crash with a crane truck traps a person on the V-23 near Sagunto
A person was trapped inside their vehicle on Thursday 3 September after it crashed into a crane truck on the V-23 road near Sagunto, heading towards Castellón, and was freed by firefighters after extrication work.
The crash happened on the V-23, a road that passes Sagunto, in the direction of Castellón, on the morning of Thursday 3 September. The alert reached the Valencia Provincial Fire Consortium (Consorcio Provincial de Bomberos de Valencia) at 9:27am, after a car collided with a crane truck. Two fire crews were sent to the scene: one from the Sagunto fire station, led by a sergeant, and another from La Pobla de Farnals, a nearby town in the Camp de Morvedre district. Sending both crews together, both part of the same provincial consortium, is standard practice whenever the initial severity of a call suggests a single station might not be enough to carry out the rescue quickly; the consortium organises its crews by area precisely so it can always call on whichever crew is closest to a given incident, whatever town it happens to be based in.
On arrival, firefighters found that the person inside the car was trapped and could not get out on their own. Crews began extrication work — the standard technique used to free someone trapped after a crash — removing part of the vehicle's frame until the person could be taken out without worsening any injuries. This kind of operation usually combines stabilising the vehicle first with the gradual use of cutting and spreading tools, so that the trapped person stays protected while the metal blocking their exit is removed; only once the opening is wide enough, and there is no risk of worsening a possible injury, does the actual extraction take place. It is a process that requires close coordination between the firefighters and the paramedics on site, who monitor the trapped person's condition throughout the manoeuvre. Once freed, the person was handed over to the paramedics who had also travelled to the scene. So far, no official information has been released about the person's condition or about the exact circumstances of the crash, such as the direction each vehicle was travelling in or whether anyone else was involved.
The V-23 is one of the main roads carrying traffic through the Sagunto municipality: just over 11 kilometres long, it links the town and its industrial areas with three other roads, the A-23, A-7 and V-21 motorways. Because of this, it is a regular route for heavy traffic leaving and entering Sagunto's port and industrial estate — trucks, machinery, and large vehicles such as the crane truck involved in this crash. That mix of heavy and everyday traffic is one reason the road carries more vehicles than smaller roads in the surrounding area, despite its relatively short length compared with the motorways it connects to. Being more of a connecting road than a long-distance route also explains why cars, delivery vans and oversized heavy vehicles such as crane trucks or construction machinery share it every day — a mixed flow of traffic that is not always easy to manage on the stretches with fewer lanes.
Incidents like this one are not daily events, but they happen fairly often around Sagunto, where industrial and regular traffic share the same roads, requiring emergency services to keep crews close by, such as the local Sagunto fire station, and to call in reinforcements from neighbouring stations — such as La Pobla de Farnals in this case — whenever the initial call requires it. That capacity for mutual support between fire stations across the district is one of the pillars behind how the Valencia Provincial Fire Consortium operates, designed so that no town in Camp de Morvedre has to rely solely on its own crew when an accident calls for more than one team at once.
So far, neither Sagunto City Council nor the Directorate-General of Traffic (DGT, Spain's national traffic authority) have reported any road closures linked to the accident, so it is unclear whether traffic was affected during the rescue and vehicle-removal work. It has also not been made clear whether the crane truck involved was carrying out assistance work at the time of the crash or was simply travelling along the road as usual. According to El Periódico de Aquí, with additional background from Wikipedia on the V-23 road.