Icy conditions enable massive crash
It’s like a giant pinball game. Or a Icecapades meets performance art. No one was killed (though someone was a few miles away on the same road).
What gets me are the people milling about on the road while crashes are in progress! :eek: :smack:
But hey, it’s Wisconsin. They probably don’t have much experience driving in snow… What? 
“He started it.”
That actually was pretty fascinating to watch all the way through. Enough speeding idiots coming through periodically and eventually it’s going to completely clog up.
That reminds me, I need to order a new set of tires.
That reminds me, I should get some chains for the Prius.
(Or just drive the Jeep if I need to go out – if it snows this year.)
It was interesting how it all started.
The last five days here in Fort Worth have been, shall we say “Less than amusing”, but I seldom saw people blasting down the road on sheet ice like that. It’s interesting how many cars were still going way too fast to manuever even after the cars started stacking up. I would think folks in Wisconsin would know better.
Hopefully, it will get warm enough here today to melt the last of it.
Yikes. I was impressed actually how many cars were able to steer around the obstructions until finally it got really jammed up. It seems to me that most of the problem could have been avoided if the car (or two?) that spun to a rest in the right lane at about 0:20 had made more of an effort to clear out to the side of the road. On the other hand, I live in San Diego. What do I know?
Quite right. But it’s depressingly normal for people to leave lightly damaged cars where they are - even when they are right in the line of fire.
A useful tip for driving in poor conditions: take account not just of the effect on the road and your vehicle, but also of the abysmal performance that can be expected of some drivers.
That’s what really struck me (no pun intended) too - people obviously could see, judging from the ones who slowed down, but some people just came flying down the road in spite of the obvious problem in front of them. My suspicion is that they just weren’t looking far enough ahead of them (which is a sign of a poorly trained driver).
Anyone else notice that a few tried to go back up the on-ramp the wrong way? Things must have been just as bad beyond the white-out range of the camera…
My dad was sensible, when teaching me to drive in western NY in the mid 70s in a honking huge 73 Chrysler New Yorker took me to the parking lot at Southtown Mall and we did all sorts of skidpad stuff so I could learn how to react safely to slipping around. One thing he impressed firmly was that in snow and slippery conditions to always travel in the right lane unless I was passing because the safest thing to do was peg the car off onto the shoulder to get out of the line of the accident as quickly as possible. He also encouraged me to travel with a backpack containing an old shelter half, a spool of that really heavy braided fish line, some duct tape, a good knife, a lighter and some munchies in case I needed to leave the car I could set a small shelter up and make a fire to stay warm.
[today our cold weather road trip stuff includes a pair of appropriate sized pumpkin suits, moon boots, russian fluffy hats and balaclavas, a 4 person tent, a couple of sleeping bags, a couple aluminum frame cots, a hand crank flashlight/hanging light, and a small camp cookset and solid fuel stove with tea bags, instant soups, and probably a case of MREs leftover from various local blackout emergency supply distributions. We keep an empty solar shower bag because it can be used to store snow melt or foraged water. Traveling in a momvan has its benefits - the ability to pack a lot of goodies:p]
More like Curling or shufflepuck, rather than Pinball.
The fortunate thing, at least from the parts I watched, where that there weren’t any big rigs. I saw a couple bobtails, but a couple 40 ton Trucks into the heart of it would have caused major damage and death.
Or you just need to not drive like the complete twat that enters bottom left at 0:10 and causes the whole thing. Seriously, every time it snows here in Britain (a reasonably rare but still usually annual event) we hear how "We British are so hopeless at coping with snow - look at countries like America, they can drive in snow blah blah blah. Those people need to watch this video.
It’s a good thing the driver of the Walmart truck at 4:15 was on the ball, especially with the number of idiots standing around in the road.
ETA: lots of comments on that page saying “stay in your vehicle”. That’s not going to help if a truck ploughs into you. I would be straight out of my car and heading a good distance into that field off to the right.
Indeed. Living in Washington DC, every winter one hears from the transient northerners how Washingtonians don’t know how to drive in snow like the people do back home. There’s a certain schadenfreude in watching this happen in Wisconsin, although of course I hope no one was hurt badly.
What’s the fish line for?*
*Yog Sosoth, who lives in Los Angeles and hasn’t touched actual snow in 30 years
I look at that and think to myself “a good number of those people were going way too fast for those conditions”
The thing is, you can’t necessarily go slower. You can see how it started - one or two guys going way too fast. If you travel at a proper speed for the conditions these terrible drivers can still get you. It starts to become that you travel as fast as the rest of the pack in these conditions because you’re afraid nobody else can brake or swerve around you, and if you start becoming a slow duck for fast drivers to drive around eventually one of them isn’t going to make it around you. There’s been plenty of times where I felt the highway speeds people were going were too fast for conditions, but if you piddle along at a good speed someone speedy is more likely to just ram straight into the back of you. It’s a tough choice to make sometimes.
I would know, because one time a dolt rammed straight into the back of me when I was slowing down in icy conditions so I wouldn’t slip straight off the exit ramp. He’d been tailgating me for over a mile. Ugh.
Rabbit/squirrel snare maybe? It’s a common survival technique thingy.
Here in Georgia, when it snows or sleets several inches, it always melts a day or two later. Then it usually refreezes and creats a nasty ice storm that makes it impossible to drive for days.
People don’t seem to understand that it doesn’t matter if you have a 4x4 or not, RUBBER all-season tires cannot get traction on solid ice!!! The only difference is whether you have two or four wheels spinning!
Even when it’s just snow, I don’t drive on it anymore. When I had a Jeep Grand Cherokee 4WD with low-range, it stuck a snowy road just as good as it did a wet one in the rain, just at slower speeds. But now that I have a FWD Mazda CX-9, even with the traction control ON and the transmission in Winter/Snow Mode (starts out in 3rd gear to reduce wheelspin), it’s a handfull even when it’s only snow. I suppose the 20" high-performance low-profile wheel/tire combo doesn’t help…
My Jeep does well in 4WD in snow. (I’ve never had to use the low range, BTW.) As you say, 4WD doesn’t do squat on ice. I feel I’m pretty good at knowing how fast I can drive in show. But on ice – which is common unless there is a good base of snow, and then still have to be aware of icy patches – I slow it way down. If I’m driving on ice, I try to move over into the snow. It’s a little safer. I slow down and become hypersensitive to how things ‘feel’.
I have yet to use my chains. If it’s that bad, I’ll work from home. Or I’ll drive necessary short distances with extreme caution. In the conditions in the video, assuming I had to be driving in them, I would be as far to the right as I could be. And slower than most of those people.
I miss my Jeep…but it was 17 years old and had 230k miles on it when I finally gave it up. It was a '95 model (the original design) and I’ve always loved the 2nd generation ('99-'04). I’ll end up buying one eventually just as a weekend/fun vehicle.
Your comment about being as far to the right as possible made me think about the first time I got ‘caught’ in a snow storm trying to get home from work. I worked in Metro Atlanta but lived about 60 miles northeast in the foothills of the North Georgia Mountains. I didn’t have any trouble for the first 50 miles, traffic was just moving on the highway at about half the normal speed. Then it started getting worse and accumulating more and more snow on the road. Once I got off the highway and onto the side streets, it was getting very slippery! I had a new '96 Accord EX 4-door with a 5-speed manual transmission and (luckily) the EX model added Anti-Lock Brakes that other Accords didn’t have!
I kept it in 2nd gear most of the way and when I had to stop, I tried to ease on the brakes but if it started to slide, I’d just hold the pedal down and let the ABS do it’s thing. A few miles from home, it got so bad that I seriously thought about pulling over and calling a neighbor to see if he’d fetch me in his 4x4. The snow was coming down so hard I could only see a few feet in front of me.
I was less than two miles from home and I hit what felt like black ice because the car just started sliding, no matter what I did. I managed to ease the wheels on the right side off the shoulder and onto the grass and mud, then I stood on the brake pedal hoping that the ABS would get enough traction to stop me in the grass and mud. I finally came to a halt and managed to get my car well off the road, locked it up and set out on foot for the last mile-and-a-half to my house…
Thankfully, it was Casual Friday so I was wearing jeans and tennis shoes. Any other day I would’ve been wearing slacks and hard-soled dress shoes and my ass would’ve been toast! But I made it home and went back after it melted four days later to fetch my car…
