Fog causes 75-vehicle pileup on Houston tollway
Houston is not like California, where drivers can frequently encounter fog. Here, most drivers become blithering idiots when confronted with anything out of the ordinary. This was no exception.
Heavy, dense fog caused one of the largest traffic collisions in Houston's history this morning, and sparked a large fire that engulfed numerous cars on the south Sam Houston Tollway.
When it was over, 75 cars were wrecked, 9 of them severely burned. No one was killed, but 21 people were taken to area hospitals, five of them with serious injuries, said Dr. David Persse, the Houston Fire Department's physician director of emergency medicine....
The mass collision sparked a fire that started with one car and spread to others. Bystanders pulled the man with chest pains from his vehicle after it caught fire.
"It was surreal," said Madonna Yancey, 42, of Missouri City. "People were running, people were screaming. My main concern was to see if other individuals were injured."
Yancey said she went from one crumpled vehicle to the next making sure everyone was alive. When she realized no one had been killed, Yancey said, "I just raised my hands up and said `praise God.' "
None of those injured suffered burns, Persse said, although some vehicles were reduced by the blaze to hulks of metal with their tires melted away.
There were so many cars, traffic investigators had to spray paint numbers on them to keep track of the order of the collision. It was a wrecker driver's dream and mass numbers of tow trucks filled up available space on the bridge.
Half of the wrecked vehicles were on one side of the tollway and an almost identical number was on the other side.
"It is just God's will that nobody was killed," said Capt. Ray Valenta, of the Harris County Precinct 5 Constable's Office. "It looks like a battlefield. Vehicles were in all positions, still burning. It was like something you would see in a movie."
Yet another excuse to stay home and watch football....
