A sanitation worker was killed yesterday after his truck skid out of control on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, sending him flying from the vehicle as it became lodged on the edge of an elevated section of the roadway. Traffic was tied up for hours as rescue crews removed the truck from the highway, where it had flipped over and was dangling from the guardrail overlooking Furman Street and the Port Authority piers in Brooklyn Heights.

Officials said Michael Occhino, 25, lost control of his vehicle shortly after 3 a.m. when the 20-ton sanitation truck hit a patch of slick pavement covered with what officials believe was diesel fuel that leaked from another vehicle. After being thrown from the truck, he plunged some 20 feet off the roadway. He was pronounced dead at Bellevue Hospital, officials said.

It took crews more than seven hours to disentangle the truck from the mangled guardrail. During that time, all three lanes of the highway were shut down as specialized squads from the fire department responded to the scene, located perpendicular to Pineapple Street. Ultimately, crews secured the truck to a heavy crane provided by Con Edison and lifted the truck off the expressway at about 10:30 a.m., officials said.

Two lanes were reopened shortly before noon, and crews installed temporary guardrails while repairing the 60-foot stretch that had been damaged.

Occhino was heading toward a Sanitation Department garage on Shore Parkway when the accident occurred, a department spokesman, Matthew Li Pani, said. A sanitation worker since 2004, he was working the midnight to 8 a.m. shift yesterday. At the time of the accident, he was alone in the truck.

Mayor Bloomberg, who visited Occhino’s parents and a twin brother who is a firefighter, said the family is devastated. “His mother said to me, ‘We always worried about our son the firefighter, but here it is the other one who lost his life,'” Mr. Bloomberg said.