Witness describes deadly I-35 pileup as ‘never ending’

FORT WORTH — What started as an average day for Ryan Chaney turned into “a genocide of metal” as he found himself pulling people from the wreckage of a mass-casualty crash in Fort Worth on Thursday morning.

Chaney, an independent trucker from Argyle, about 30 miles north of Fort Worth, was driving south on I-35 to work, where he hauls power poles for Sabre Industries. The 6 a.m. traffic moved at about 60 mph on mostly dry roads.

As he neared the 820 interchange in his pickup, Chaney noticed his headlights reflecting off the surface of the road and realized there could be black ice. He and other cars around him slowed to about 20 mph.

But as he reached the 35W bridge near downtown Fort Worth, the road turned into “a solid sheet of ice,” he said. The driver next to him spun out and hit a barrier. He slid into the car, luckily not causing much damage, and gained enough control to pull to the side of the highway.

Chaney got out of his truck and stood next to a concrete barrier that separated him from the TEXPress lanes.

As he recovered from his own fender bender in the main lanes of traffic, Chaney watched a car slide on the ice and into the barrier inside the TEXPress lanes. Another car was unable to slow down and smashed into the first car.

“The truck behind that vehicle tried to sacrifice himself into the concrete barrier, but the ice was so slick that as soon as he hit the brakes, it was over,” Chaney said. “He pushed them about 30 feet. And then it was car, truck, car, truck, car — it was never ending.”

Cars slid and crashed into one another for about three minutes. During a pause in the chaos, Chaney jumped over the barrier to try and help. He found some people who needed help getting out of their cars. Most of the people seemed OK, so Chaney started to walk through the pileup to see if more people needed help.

The crash quickly became worse. A grain hopper truck smashed into the stopped cars and exploded, he said.

“I couldn’t see a foot in front of my face,” he said. “All that stuff was in the air, and I figured that’s where I should focus my attention, where it was worse.”

“People called me a hero, but I’m just like no. It’s kind of fight or flight.”

Ryan Chaney

He saw a woman inside a small car, crumpled to the point that he could not tell what kind of car it was. The woman was screaming, so he jumped the rail and tried to get to her. He was in-between a tractor-trailer, the rear of a tractor-trailer and her car, which was wedged between the two vehicles.

Chaney was trying to help her out of the trapped car when he saw a FedEx truck heading toward them. He dove under the tractor-trailer and watched helplessly as the truck slammed into the woman.

“And she was crushed to death,” he said.

In total, about 100 vehicles were part of the roughly mile-long wreckage, according to authorities.

Six people have been confirmed dead, and about 65 were injured.

“People called me a hero, but I’m just like no. It’s kind of fight or flight,” Chaney said. “Either you leave or you stay and fight it out. And my instinct was to stay and see what I could do. I didn’t want to just pull out my phone and record like a pansy.”

He urged people to stop sharing photos and videos of the crash, warning that people might recognize a loved one’s car in the wreckage before they know what happened to them.

“Nobody needs to see that, especially people that were there that witnessed things,” he said. “Because then they relive it.”

He said he is “internally confused and sad,” and frustrated by the way people were trapped in the pileup by the TEXpress lanes. The lanes require motorists to pay an electronic toll as a way to get around congestion that chronically occurs near downtown Fort Worth.

“You’re trapped by two walls,” he said. “It was basically turned into a gigantic slip and slide.”