I think I’d be safer staying in a metal cage than risking stepping onto a highway with out of control vehicles. I’d be curious to see where the fatalities were located in this carnage.
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Yeah, I can see the value in that.
It’s would be difficult call to make.
Those big trucks seem to cause carnage though.
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If there were people in some of those cars (I’m thinking the Toyota FJ Cruiser about a minute and a half in?) then they are certainly dead. I’m tempted to say, if you’re not going to die of hypothermia, that maybe you’d be better off out of the car and on the other side of the drainage ditch from the road.
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The FJ Cruiser driver survived! I hope they immediately went out and bought a lottery ticket.
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People complain about NE road conditions and drivers, but at least we’re prepared and salt the roads (I’m not going to defe. I’m guessing TX doesn’t have a whole lot of infrastructure to do the same.
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At least one of the fatalities was a woman who had exited her vehicle.
Unfortunately, like a lot of the highways here in North Texas, that stretch is divided into free lanes and pay-only “express” lanes, divided from the rest of the traffic by Jersey barriers. Once the first three or four cars had piled up, the express lanes became an inescapable kill zone.
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Thanksgiving Day? If so, I was in it with you. Was headed back to Birmingham after some college admissions interviews. The interstate was a hell of a mess, and they’re a mess already, even without the added difficulty of ice. Not sure I’ve been back to Dallas since, so I cant imagine it now.
This wreck reminds me of the fog pileup in Tennessee in 1990. Twelve dead. The fog was so thick that most of the cars in the pileup didn’t even know it was there until after they were wrecked.
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While many have cb radios they purchase themselves, they aren’t standard equipment included with the truck, and in this age of wireless cellphones I’m sure they are way less common than they were back in the day (facilities that used to communicate to you with on the radio will just call or text your number now).
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If only they’d flipped over to Google Maps from Face###k…
That’s horrifying. Considering people died I’m not sure that footage should be circulating. I couldn’t watch all of it.
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I had a similar thought. I rely on Waze and the self-reporting feature for various road hazards as well as avoiding police speed traps. Today there was a tractor trailer crash on I-40 coming into Albuquerque that Waze helped avoid most of the backup. It is not clear whether ice and sudden fog events could be helped by Waze reporting. Another thought I had was whether stability control or traction control systems could do a better job of detecting instability. The current systems of traction control will flash an icon when torque demand exceeds available traction, but I’ve never seen a system what warns that the car is using the yaw control and torque vectoring features to maintain directional control.
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On the contrary, I hope they went out and thanked the engineer who designed the passenger shell in that vehicle.
It’s not an accident (pardon the pun) that most people walk away from most crashes like this, even when the vehicle is an unrecognizable ball. It’s called the “room to live” concept. Every part of modern vehicles are designed to sacrifice themselves to dissipate energy and preserve a volume of space around the seats. It’s also why it’s a myth that bigger, heavier old cars are safer. All that steel does you no good while you’re being speared with the steering column or bouncing off a steel dashboard. Modern car accidents look worse than older ones by design. The car balling up like that is what saves your life.
So- have you thanked an engineer today?
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I want to ask: was the road gritted? Do they even do gritting there?
Off-topic here’s a great story about gritting trucks in Scotland.
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North Texas is not known for heavy snow so they have limited equipment for such things like sanding or salting.
They get ice storms like this a couple times a year at most but when they do hit, it comes on so fast they don’t have time to treat the extensive number of highways
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Must be very fast if they can’t get out in time, when freezing temperatures are forecast - or maybe they aren’t forecast well, or early enough.
Round here they actively use weather forecasts to trigger the overnight gritting runs, with a ‘precautionary principle’ - i.e. the forecast does not have to be firm about freezing temperatures for the gritters to get going.
But in general I guess that if it is somewhere where freezing temperatures are very much the exception there might not be the capacity, nor the close attention paid to forecasts, with gritters on standby.
As you say, North Texas is probably not known for regular freezing overnight.
Do they have road signs pointing out that elevated highway sections will ice up first? I recall driving in S. Carolina (not exactly known for lots of cold weather?) and seeing “Bridge Ices Before Road” signs on the approach to every bridge section on the main highways.
Sure, but weather forecasts these days are certainly accurate enough to predict temperatures low enough to require precautionary measures such as gritting and warning signs several days ahead, even a week ahead, so there is no excuse for not gritting all major roads and highways/freeways the day before.
Watching the video is terrifying, most of those drivers don’t even appear to be aware of there being any issues ahead from far enough back to have taken their feet off the gas and down-shifted to use engine-braking to avoid skidding, they’re driving full-tilt into stationary traffic. Maybe they were on Twitter or Facebook and not paying attention - there was footage on British news the other evening from a stealth truck used by Police, showing a trucker using two mobile phones at the same time while driving, so not distracted in the slightest!
My thoughts are with the innocent victims and their families, it’s a terrible way to lose loved ones. 
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All I can think of watching this video, is that every car can have GPS now. Every car can have 6 different flavors of radio. It’s the 21st century. Why haven’t we taken steps by now to extend the range of brake lights? brake lights don’t have to be purely visual, they could be part of an instrument flight reference for ground vehicles. When conditions get bad enough, we should bar VFR vehicles from the road.
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I’m not sure how much gritting the roads in advance would have helped; it might have been covered under the ice.
We do. TxDOT seems reluctant to use it though.
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The irony in the PNW is that we have a ton of snow moving capacity, but that it doesn’t really get deployed when we have snow in the valleys because it’s all committed in the mountains. It’s probably easier to get around at 5000’ elevation today than at 50’.
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