Car crashes into a crane on the V-23 near Sagunto on Thursday
A person had to be freed from their vehicle on Thursday morning after crashing into a crane on the V-23, near Sagunto in the direction of Castellón, according to the Valencia Provincial Fire Service Consortium.
The crash happened on Thursday morning, 3 September, on the V-23 motorway, near the municipality of Sagunto and heading towards Castellón, the Valencia Provincial Fire Service Consortium confirmed. A car collided with a crane travelling on the road, and one of the car's occupants was left trapped inside after the impact. Firefighters had to extract them using rescue tools before they could be taken away by medical services.
The Fire Service Consortium has not yet given details on the health of the person rescued or the exact cause of the collision, pending completion of the official accident report. The consortium provides fire and rescue cover across the whole of Valencia province, including this stretch of the V-23 within Camp de Morvedre. As is usual in this kind of incident, it is the relevant traffic authorities who, based on that report, determine the precise causes of the crash and any liability; until then, neither the consortium nor other official sources tend to give assessments of the injuries involved, precisely so as not to interfere with the ongoing investigation.
Crashes involving heavy machinery, like the crane in this incident, tend to be more complex for emergency crews than a collision between two cars: the size and weight of these vehicles can complicate extraction work and often require closing more lanes than usual while the wreckage is cleared, adding the risk of further tailbacks on a road already busy with industrial traffic.
The stretch of the V-23 where the crash happened is part of one of the main transport corridors for the Sagunto municipality. Running for barely eleven kilometres, this motorway connects the town and its industrial estates with the A-23, A-7 and V-21 motorways, making it a regular route for lorries and heavy machinery — including cranes like the one involved in this crash — travelling to and from the port and the industrial zones of Puerto de Sagunto (coastal district). That mix of industrial and general traffic makes the V-23 a road particularly busy with heavy vehicles, something traffic authorities take into account when monitoring this stretch. Sagunto is home to much of the industrial activity of the Camp de Morvedre district, with large plants such as ArcelorMittal (steel mill) and the Saggas gas terminal nearby, which explains why heavy vehicles and large machinery are a regular part of traffic in the area.
In the Valencian Community, investigating crashes on interurban motorways like the V-23 usually falls to the Guardia Civil's traffic unit (Agrupación de Tráfico), which draws up the official report used to reconstruct what happened and, where applicable, establish liability.
Traffic accidents combining ordinary cars with heavy industrial vehicles, such as cranes or articulated lorries, tend to cluster around the times workers enter and leave the industrial estates, when commuter traffic overlaps with machinery being moved to active building sites. In a district like Camp de Morvedre, where several heavy industries operate side by side, that mix of traffic repeats daily on stretches like this one on the V-23, which is why roads like it get specific attention from the authorities responsible for road safety.
Heavy vehicles such as cranes or lorries carrying industrial machinery need longer braking distances and wider turning radii than an ordinary car, which makes joining or overtaking manoeuvres around them more delicate. On roads like the V-23, where this kind of traffic mixes daily with light vehicles heading to the industrial estates or into Sagunto itself, that difference in vehicle behaviour is one of the factors traffic authorities often point to when analysing accident rates on this type of corridor.
For those who use this road daily, traffic authorities' usual advice around large, heavy vehicles is to keep a greater-than-normal safety distance, avoid overtaking on stretches with reduced visibility, and take extra care where traffic joins from the industrial estates — precisely the points where this kind of heavy traffic tends to build up.
Crashes like this one are a reminder of how important caution is on a road that combines through-traffic with the heavy vehicles linked to Sagunto's port and industrial activity. For residents who use the V-23 daily to reach Sagunto's industrial estates or head towards Castellón, incidents like this are a reminder of how often the road is shared with heavy machinery. The area is also going through the final stretch of construction on the PowerCo battery gigafactory in Sagunto this year, adding further heavy traffic to the surrounding roads, including the V-23; it is common for the final phases of a project this size, with the arrival of large industrial equipment, to generate temporary spikes of heavy traffic on the nearest access roads. According to elperiodic.com, with additional background from Wikipedia on the V-23 motorway.