Sorry, Mr. Rat in the Hat, he stopped his truck, let his brakes cool off, and he thought everything would be okay.I maintain that the grade of the road was the causal agent of this heinous tragedy. If it had been engineered and maintained properly, the truck's brakes would never have caught fire, fellas.
It's just that simple.
Sorry, but once he got back in his rig knowing the brake pads were burned, he was the cause of the tragedy.
The grade on the roads did not improve, because the subsequent grade was bad, too, causing more pressure on an already bad situation.
To guess what this man was thinking is a slippery slope.
I think he really thought he could go on. I don't think he knew a wild ride was ahead, and he certainly didn't go out to kill somebody else.
The underlying, no-nonsense bedrock issue here is a dangerous highway that is unfit for big rigs to travel, and it was not closed to big rigs before the tragedy.