Heavy snowfall contributed to pileups involving dozens of vehicles and shutdown two major highways in Indiana, State Police said Tuesday afternoon. Authorities said they were working to remove the vehicles and clean up the roadways.
Heavy snowfall and a driver going too fast for the conditions contributed to a pile-up involving 13 cars– including nine tractor-trailers– that has shut down Interstate 70 in east central Indiana, State Police said. Several other smaller crashes on westbound lanes of I-70 were also attributed to the pileup reported around 10:30 a.m., near Richmond in Wayne County.
Two crashes involving about 40 vehicles were also reported in a half-mile stretch of Interstate-74, about 60 miles of Wayne County on the Indiana/Ohio state line, police said. The main crash involved about 29 vehicles, including 17 tractor-trailers and passenger vehicles, according to a state police report.
“We had a squall of wind and snow that came through which caused whiteout conditions,” Indiana State Police Sgt. Stephen Wheeles said of the I-74 crashes, which sent six people to the hospital, some with serious but not believed to be life-threatening injuries. “It is believed those conditions along with the roadway conditions caused a chain reaction crash.”
Photos of the I-70 incident show multiple tractor-trailers piled up on a snow blanketed roadway. Some of the vehicles are overturned. Indiana State Police Sgt. John Bowling said three people were transported to hospitals with non-life threatening injuries.
State transportation officials had warned about possible hazardous road conditions for Tuesday’s morning commute, with several inches of snow and strong wind gusts in the forecast for much of Indiana. Sub-freezing temperatures and blowing snow have made roadways slick and hazardous across the state since the weekend.
Eyewitnesses reported low visibility when the incident occurred on the I-70, Indiana Department of Transportation Spokesman Nathan Riggs said.
“Drivers could not see to avoid secondary collisions,” Riggs said. “Road conditions were not snow-covered or icy at the time of the crash, but snowfall was intense and wind speeds were about 20 mph with 35 mph gusts. This created white-out conditions and motorists were traveling too fast to be able to stop within their visibility range when they encountered the initial crash.”
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SOURCE: The Washington Post, Luz Lazo
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