There's a reason that officials recommend avoiding driving during bad weather, especially during the winter. It's for your own safety as much as those around you. Just take this latest example. More than 100 vehicles ended up in a massive pileup due to a whiteout storm. Things came to a sudden halt on an Oregon highway in the middle of a snowstorm.
Blizzard conditions caused vehicles including 18-wheelers to crash into each other in a series of crashes. Things turned treacherous quickly, and many drivers were caught up in the whiteout storm that caused a pile-up. The rapid series of crashes was like dominos falling into each other, and it even led to an SUV fire.
Officials ended up closing part of Interstate-84 causing delays for travelers. Passengers and drivers became trapped in their cars. The sheriff's department wrote, "Westbound I-84 is closed, 3 miles west of Multnomah Falls due to a multi-vehicle crash. Responders are on their way. Avoid traveling if you can."
100 Car Pileup
First responders had their work cut out tending to the pileup. Walking in the whiteout storm, first responders went from car to car to check on travelers and see if they needed medical attention. The number of those injured in the pileup remains unknown at this time. However, it appears no one was seriously injured.
"Most of the reported crashes are non-injury or minor injury," an Oregon state police spokesperson said, according to KATU. "There are no known fatal injuries or even serious injuries at this time."
One traveler opened up about trying to avoid the pileup.
"The visibility was so low by the time we got to the stopped traffic," one of the travelers told KATU. "We tried to stop; we ended up smashing into a semi-truck and another passenger truck and got stuck there for a minute. We heard somewhere crashes behind us, so we decided to go ahead and go ahead and go through, in between the semi-truck and the median."
The snow storm got so bad that the Oregon Department of Transportation closed the highway in both directions for portions of the road.
"Closures are due to blowing and drifting snow with visibility less than 500 feet," the state DOT wrote.
