(Asian News Hub) – At least six people died after icy road surfaces led to a traffic wreck in US’ Texas states in which 133 vehicles crashed into each other. The accident occurred in the Fort Worth area in the express lanes of Interstate-35.
As many as 65 people were injured, who were taken to the hospitals for treatment, as per news agency Reuters.
“There were multiple people that were trapped within the confines of their vehicles and requiring use of hydraulic rescue equipment to successfully extricate them,” Forth Worth Fire Chief Jim Davis told a news briefing.
Video from the scene showed dozens of smashed cars and trucks, some literally piled on top of one another on a slick roadway under cloudy skies.
A large stretch of the highway was closed in both directions for hours after the crash.
A line of freezing rain stretched from Texas to West Virginia, with some of it accumulating to one-quarter to one-half inch, according to meteorologist Marc Chenard at the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.
The Texas precipitation was part of a system that brought rain to several Southeastern states and modest amounts of snow to West Virginia, Maryland and New Jersey, Chenard said.
A separate storm system will make its presence felt in the mid-Atlantic region on Saturday, he said.
“That may bring potentially significant freezing rain accumulations to portions of Virginia and Maryland,” he added.
Yet another weather system was moving into the Pacific Northwest, where it was forecast to remain through Saturday and bring as much as 8 inches (20 cm) of snow to normally rainy Seattle and 12 inches (30 cm) to Portland, Oregon.
Seattle averages about 6 inches of snow in an entire winter season.
