I had wondered how such a big pile-up could happen in the daytime.
Just south of the Stockyards. First wreck, I believe, was around Pharr St exit and then it stretched back north towards NE 28th. I know some of the pictures showed the restaurants and church around Yucca which is about a mile up the highway from Pharr.
We haven’t had ice in a couple of years but I think it had more to do with this being sneaky ice. The highways didn’t look bad (and they do pre-treat) and the rain was so light I don’t think folks realized it was coating the roads.
This is going to be the coldest week of the year here by a huge margin. Heck, it was almost 80 a couple of days ago. The last forecast I saw had a low of 1 degree Monday night. I’ve lived here all my life and I can’t recall the last time we had single digits, much less damn near zero.
Wow. I grew up in Texas and lived there 35 years, and I can literally only remember once it getting that cold (it was the late 80s, and I was living in Fort Worth). Our house wasn’t really weatherproofed for that, it was pretty bitter.
People there really did have trouble driving on ice as it is, this to your point sounds even way more treacherous than usual.
Okay, a rise makes more sense–it was looking like real flat with no impeded sight lines so that’s a little more excusable. And I noted in the video that the slow moving cars right next to the car that was filming were wheel spinning pretty briskly at what looked like walking speed. Which tells me nobody had any clue of how to proceed on ice, which basically involves nearly forgetting you even have a gas pedal. Likewise forget the brake pedal, because neither one will do a damned thing.
Scenic Bluff
Here is approximately where the wreck happened. Maserschmidt, do you remember Mercado Juarez? Maybe that big round church?
They had just crossed a bridge, I think there is a bit of a dip there.
Yeah, it’s an undulating section of freeway that becomes elevated off the ground in a way that’s hard to detect. I’m not surprised that people were caught out by the sudden sheet of ice, no matter how tragic it is.
But really, I’ve driven in nothing but Texas when it’s cold. Our cold weather conditions are their own special thing, black ice is more common than snow. If you’re nearing freezing and the road looks wet, assume you can’t stop on it, and slow down to 15-20MPH as soon as you can. Sadly, this looks like a situation where the road looked and felt only wet, until it wasn’t. When north Texas gets cold and precipitation at the same time, it’s often only a “bridges and overpasses may ice” situation. This was a particularly pernicious version of that. The precipitation was very light, barely coating my car. At 9:15AM, it was able to clear its windows with just its defroster in less than five minutes, but the same 1/32nd of an inch of ice is amazingly deadly when applied to a bridge surface. It’s not even what you’d think of as glossy most of the time, it just looks wet, but it’s a skating rink. When I left for the Dr around 9:30, I still hit a few patches that looked as wet of the rest of the road, it wasn’t an elevated surface, but no amount of throttle was acceptable.
My heart goes out to anyone involved in this. I can’t say that I can fault them unless they’ve driven a lot in the odd conditions north Texas sees every other winter.
Are charges ever filed in cases like this? The semi that crashed into the JB Hunt truck(they were my customers many years back, hadn’t seen one in awhile) was going way too fast for conditions, many cars before him had stopped but he seemed to be going full speed. He pushed the car ahead of him so hard it went under the pickup in front of it and flipped it over. If he really was topping out over a rise, no way should he have been moving that fast.
They could have had their brakes locked to no effect - as noted above, when you are on ice you are a hockey puck.
Some truck driver will be along to correct me, but I assumed that if you drove for a big company you had made it as a driver (good pay, benefits) so you would be extra careful. Look at the FedEx driver in this one.
I agree. I assume they were all trying to pump their brakes, but by the time they saw the pile up it was too late and they just kept sliding at rull speed…just witness the truck sliding sideways at the end.
I was in the tail end of a 65 car pileup on I-93 in NH, where people generally know about driving in snow/ice. I came up over a rise at around 50 MPH (slower than the speed limit due to conditions) and saw a mass of vehicles covering the entire road. A quick application of the brakes let me know there was no way to stop before hitting the pile, so I drifted into the snow bank against the left side guard rail and let the snow slow me down. I managed to stop about 20’ before hitting the car in front of me.
Unfortunately, the guy behind me wasn’t able to stop and hit me from behind. Fortunately he was going slowly enough that there was no damage to my car, I think he’d already hit the guardrail which slowed him down.
On real ice, cars simply don’t stop on their own. Even with the best snow tires, there’s a limit to how quickly a two ton hunk of metal can slow down, and with heavier vehicles there’s little hope of stopping in those conditions.
It scares me anytime traffic stops on the Interstates. There’s always the fear a semi truck or car won’t stop. I often take the first exit and get off the Interstate ASAP. I much rather kill time in a department store or restaurant for thirty to forty minutes. That gives the police time to get traffic moving again. Sometimes I use my Garmin to find an alternate route home on city streets.
That strategy doesn’t work in icey conditions. Traffic will be stalled for hours. I try very hard to work from home and avoid driving on ice.
I feel terrible for the victims of the Texas pileup. One careless truck driver has forever changed a lot of families’ lives.
When I was a teen we were traveling up US-99 somewhere north of Fresno shortly after the tule fog had lifted. There was about a twenty-mile stretch with rear end collisions aplenty. We started counting after a while and got to over fifty vehicles. Everybody was looking sad.
Don’t vehicles built after 2012 have ABS nowdays? And even the majority of those built after 1996 have it?
Is “pumping the brakes” even applicable anymore when there’s no risk of locking them up?
Not sure if this is your question, but ABS does virtually nothing for you in a black ice situation like this. ABS maximizes braking effort for a given amount of grip available, and when that grip drops to near-zero so does the braking. You’re correct that pumping the brakes has not been correct procedure for a long time through.
Yep, realize even ABS is pretty much useless in a black ice situation. But I see recommendations of “pumping the brakes” and warnings of “you don’t want to lock up the brakes” when stories like this pop up and the advice seems outdated.
I’ve been on ice and stood on my ABS brakes. You can feel them pulsing as the vehicle slides along.
That hasn’t happened to me in … well … nearly three weeks.
[flips through $1,000 repair invoice]
Yep. Black ice = all bets are off. Studded snows or chains can help, but …
A lot of people have said “It was ice/hockey puck/nothing you could do.”
In the linked video, after showing the front view of the FedEx truck, they show a rear view. Around :25. You see the semi slam into the pile, then a car and 2 pickups. Then you see what appears to be an SUV slow and stop.
So how was THAT guy able to slow and stop?
My guess is studded tires.