We had a cold front with freezing rain overnight. A driver in the express lane must have stopped, and chain reaction commenced.
Of note, the express lane is one lane with concrete barriers on both sides, for probably a mile or more before where the accident occurred. Once in the lane, there was no where to go.
Also, some of the footage shows drivers, including semi drivers going too damn fast. Possible ice on the road people! 20mph is too fast with that shit.
Really really bad at about 1:10
ffs at about that horrible 1:10 mark it suddenly seems as tho the drivers aren’t able or trying to slow down at all…. it looks like they’re all just barreling down the road at full speed.
God damn.
…it seemed bad at about 45 seconds. And it was even worse at 50 seconds. So I was dreading what I would see at 1:10 
JFC, does nobody look ahead and see STOPPED TRUCKS and think maybe they should fucking slow down? Does nobody put their emergency flashers on to let those behind them know there’s a Big Problem Ahead? There’s so much time in between crashes people should have been at least slowing down but apparently not so much. Fuck.
I could almost see something this stupid happening down south when a once in a decade frost happens, because they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing, but in Fort Collins they should know how weather works.
Ft Worth, not Ft Collins.
I’ve been in a situation like this. No snow, barely a drizzle. I didn’t think anything of the weather until I hit the brakes at 70mph and they didn’t do anything. Fortunately I saw all the commotion in front of me and hit the brakes early, and eventually found some traction. But man, I did the calculation and I was on a course to hit hard if the ice didn’t abate. Real pucker moment. 10 miles further along and it was snow and slush, which did a lot better job at communicating the traction available. But that transition period, where it was just cold and ice with no warning, yikes.
Driving up north in the winter is a lot more predictable. I don’t envy the South when it comes to stuff like this.
Yeah, you’d think that after the first fifty cars, drivers would notice the huge pile of crashed vehicles, but they’re plowing into each other like it’s a video game.
Hell - people are idiots. This eve in Chicago area, temps in the teens - where they’ve been for a week or so. Evening rush - snow flurries, as it seems just about every day for a week or so. Pretty much every stage of snow and ice on the streets. We’re slowly approaching a red light, and some fucker in a pickup leans on the horn because apparently we’re not getting up to the red light fast enough.
No shit–worst examples of this sort of pileup usually have some impaired vision in play like intense fog on the Yolo Causeway outside of Sacramento or when wildfire smoke swept across a freeway in Southern California, stuff like that. But it’s CLEAR, there’s no apparent reason why people couldn’t see this shit coming and get off the gas, put their flashers on and start decelerating the traffic behind them. But it looks like they’re going balls out until they’re like a hundred feet off the end of the crash and boom, one more. Fucking crazy.
Lack of proactive road treatment, versus the norm for more wintry climes. Yet another reason I stay home when it gets icy/snowy around here.
Further, I want to say this incident happened over a slight rise. Which means people approaching the scene couldn’t apprehend there was a problem in time to do anything about it. Or people had their heads up their asses as usual while behind the wheel: texting, screwing with their phones, the radio, yelling at kids. You name it.
Tragic, all the way around. Nowhere to go, and incredibly violent. I’m surprised only six have died so far.
Ice is just a freaking horror to drive on. All it takes is a fraction of a fraction of an inch to turn a highway dangerous and you will never see it even after it’s wrecked you.
Today was that kind of day in Fort Worth.
We had narrow and light bands of precipitation move through the city with temps in the upper-20s. Because of how the bands moved through the area, the roads were mostly clear, except for the obviously elevated sections so I expect traffic was moving at pretty close to posted speeds or more (60-65mph in downtown) as it headed south into the city.
It is almost unnoticeable as you drive it, but that section of highway where the pileup occurred is elevated with a slight downhill grade. And the rain had put down that fraction of ice to strip the grip completely away.
Ingredients for disaster. Once folks were on that ice, it was just the physics of a hockey puck.
If you’ve never been surprised by ice, you can’t imagine the helplessness you feel as a driver. As steronz notes, the pucker factor is high because about all you can do is hang on and pray.
I was wrecked many decades ago now on a sunny day. It had iced a couple days before and I was headed to work on a back road that was clear, doing about 40mph, maybe. It took but a second for me to swap ends and find myself in the ditch on the other side of the road facing the way I had been coming from. Couldn’t figure out what was up until I walked back up the street and found the slight bridge I had gone over. It was shaded so the sun hadn’t melted the ice and had left just enough of a patch to throw the car for a loop.
The only smart thing to do when roads are icy is to go back to bed until it is all gone.
Something like this HAD to be the reason that the drivers couldn’t see what was happening ahead of them. Especially semi drivers, who can see a long ways down the road. Nobody was attempting to slow down.
I would suspect black ice. Early in the morning it may not have been obvious at all. I grew up in the Midwest, driving on some of this—you learn to test your brakes from time to time, back off the accelerator, etc. But in the South, who knows that?
Plus black ice can be patchy. Bridges ice before the rest of the pavement, and there are not a lot of salt trucks in Texas. Maybe add a distracted driver, funnel everyone together with Jersey barriers, limit vision when cresting a hill or going around a curve…lots of possibilities.
Whatever happened to CBs? The electronic warnings over the road could have helped. So tragic…this says it was 1-1.5 miles long.
I had a bad time a few years ago heading to Dallas during wintry conditions. Some holiday Friday evening, so the highways were crowded. We were on the long I-45 causeway over the Trinity River floodplain. Naturally, it iced up. Naturally, TxDoT did fuck-all to prep the road. Leaving us in a very, very sloooow convoy of cars going maybe 5-10 MPH and dead straight. Like, not touching the gas beyond idle, hazards flashing, lights on.
Next to us, overtaking (LOL!) in Lane #2 or 3, is a genius in a crew-cab truck, towing a pontoon boat and trailer. Then we started hearing it: Zzzit!-Zzzit!Zit!!! as his tires began spinning and he started a perfect 8 wheel or so straight drift to the right across the lanes of traffic to his right. I remember seeing the driver’s terrified face in a quick glance at my side-view mirror. I don’t know what happened to him. Eventually, we got off the skating rink and onto a highway that wasn’t totally iced.
To Hell with driving in ice.
Woops, I have no idea how I made that brain fart. Well that explains that, then, I suppose. Texans are unfamiliar with the idea of what to do when a) your car no longer grips the road or b) there’s a massive pileup ahead of you.
That’s truly horrifying. I’m trying to picture where that is…is that up by the stockyards? When I lived in Fort Worth it didn’t ice up very often, but it did once on the old overpass in front of the old post office, and that was a terror, especially the way people drove.
If I did that, I’d be in bed half the year. 
I was a Greyhound bus passenger in winter of 1988 and we ran into a patch of freezing rain. At the bottom of a shallow hill, a car sideswiped the bus pretty hard and our driver pulled off to wait for the police. A second car skittered and fishtailed trying to stop then whacked into the first car. The car behind him slid into it as well. After a couple moments, a police car crested the hill, red flashing lights on. It was moving slowly and cautiously. About 35 yards from the other cars, it lost traction and twisted sideways and slid at an angle into the other cars. I watched a police officer get out of the car, holding onto the part of the doorframe that surrounded the driver’s side window. One very carefully planted step. Another. Lets go of the door. Arms wide for balance. Another step. Then an abrupt and painful-looking faceplant onto the ice.
That damn stuff has a friction coeffient of 0.