‘People were RUNNING for their LIVES’
AT LEAST THREE DEAD AFTER ‘APOCALYPTIC’ 14-VEHICLE PILEUP
The first thing that Luba Zariczny remembers is staring through her windshield and being awed by the mushroom clouds of smoke and fire towering overhead.
Then came the ear- splitting explosions, one after another. Boom. Whooosh. Boom. Even as she skirted her car along the shoulder of Highway 400, an hour north of Toronto, the intense heat coming from the opposite side of the road caused her to recoil in her driver’s seat.
“It felt like over 100 ovens beaming heat,” she said Wednesday.
What Zariczny, 25, had witnessed l ate Tuesday night was the fiery aftermath of a horrific 14- vehicle pileup in the northbound lanes of the highway, south of Barrie, Ont., that left at least three people dead and sent terrified motorists running for their lives.
One law enforcement officer described the scene as “apocalyptic.”
“There are cars everywhere, twisted transport trucks, destroyed vehicles, metal that is unrecognizable as to whether or not it is a vehicle at all or not,” Ontario Provincial Police Sgt. Kerry Schmidt told reporters near the scene. “And that’s why we’re still looking to determine any other victims that may be inside the vehicles.”
Police said the chain reaction started when an impaired driver was involved in a roll- over collision with other vehicles on the highway. That caused northbound traffic to slow.
A transport truck then crashed into that slowing traffic, triggering a pileup that involved at least four transport trucks and two fuel tankers carrying thousands of litres of fuel.
The second crash sent fuel “rolling down the highway” and “people were running for their lives to not be encompassed by the moving fire,” Schmidt said.
OPP Commissioner Vince Haw ke s did not mince words, telling reporters there was no reason that a truck driver should have been going at that speed. It was a clear night, on a straight stretch of highway, going downhill.
The emergency vehicles attending the first incident should have been clearly visible to the approaching truck driver, he said.
“There’s really no excuse for that transport truck to continue at the speeds that they did and impact the vehicles that were in the queue.”
Hawkes compared transport trucks to “missiles” on the highway. “It’s down there.” As of early Wednesday evening, the victims had not yet been publicly identified.
Just days earlier, Hawkes had convened a press conference to sound the alarm over fatal collisions caused by distracted truck drivers.
Since Jan. 1, there have been more than 5,000 transport truck- related collisions that have left 67 people dead, police say.
Marco Beghetto, a spokesman for the Canadian Trucking Alliance and the Ontario Trucking Association, said Wednesday that issues related to driver behaviour and error — including distracted driving, driver fatigue and aggressive driving — are all “top of mind” in the industry right now.
Be ghetto noted there was a 66 per cent decline in truck- involved fatalities on Ontario roads from 1995 to 2014. That said, there’s “clearly room for improvement.”
The national alliance is working with provinces to establish minimum hours of road and classroom training before drivers can apply for their commercial driving road tests, he said.
Transport Canada is set to roll out new rules regarding the installation of electronic logs to monitor how often drivers take breaks. Right now in Canada, such logs are typically kept on paper and easy to manipulate, Beghetto said.
He added that the industry is not opposed to taking a look at adopting collision-avoidance technology—becoming more common in passenger vehicles — if it “makes sense and is proven to work.”
On Wednesday morning, the area around the crash was littered with twisted metal, pieces of what looked like molten debris and the skeletons of burned- out vehicles.
Premier Kathleen Wynne expressed her condolences to the victims’ families, calling the accident “a horrible, horrible tragedy.”
“We will in the aftermath of this collision, obviously we will look at what happened, we will be advised on whether there’s more that could have been done to prevent such a crash,” she said.
Kaitlin Shaw, 22, was heading northbound towards Barrie with her boyfriend and singing along to George Michael, when they were stopped by the wreckage just before 11:30 p.m.
Suddenly, they heard a loud “bang” and flames shot up into the air.
“I have never seen anything like this in my life. I was so scared. I was shaking,” she later recalled in a Facebook post.
Shaw and her fiancé joined other motorists in a police-led convoy away from the flames.
Zariczny, 25, who had just visited her boyfriend in Barrie, was heading south toward her home in Mississauga when she came upon the inferno.
As flames licked against the median, they sent embers flying over cars ahead of her.
Some cars with t heir windows blown out were pressed against the median, while other cars were in a ditch.
A car horn droned on somewhere in the distance.
In a 17- second video clip that Zariczny later posted on YouTube showing billowing clouds of smoke and flame, the only words she utters are: “Oh my god.”