Illinois dust storm causes deadly interstate pileup
A dust storm swept across an interstate road in central Illinois, causing more than 70 commercial and passenger cars to crash and pile up, killing six and injuring at least 37 on Monday.
The crashes occurred within a two-mile stretch of Interstate 55, just north of Farmersville, in Montgomery County, Illinois State Police said in a statement. Police responded Monday close to 11 a.m., closing the road and diverting traffic, until the vehicles can be removed and inspected for safety.
As of Tuesday morning, the interstate has at least one lane open, per WGN News.
Identified as deceased in the wreck was 88-year-old Shirley Harper of Franklin, Wisconsin, reported police. The identities of other victims have not been released yet. Those injured in the crash range from two years old to beyond 80 years old, police said.
Kevin Schott, the director of Montgomery Emergency Management Agency, said the scene was “very emotional,” and something that’s hard to train for, in a press conference, per ABC 7.
What was it like to be in the dust storm pileup?
Quetta Penson, who was driving home to Chicago at the time, witnessed the pileup and told ABC 7 that it looked like a “war zone.”
“We could see bodies that were just lifeless laying in the grass on the side of the road,” Penson said.
Another driver named Nathan Cormier said that when he first drove into the dust storm, “it was light at first,” and then “became a gray out,” he told ABC 7. He pulled off to the side of the road when his visibility was reduced and started helping people out of their cars, seeing one man with “cracked ribs” and “a lot of facial contusions from airbag deployments.”
He captured this footage, posted by Fox 2 St. Louis.
“It was a doozy day,” Cormier said.
What caused the dust storm in Illinois?
During this time of year, farmers in the area begin to plow their fields which contributed to the big dust storm, reported CNN.
“The deciding factor today was the tilled fields,” CNN meteorologist Chad Myers said. “This was a localized event by localized conditions.”
With winds blowing at 45 miles per hour, the plowed dirt took to the sky and moved across the road, creating a cloud that reduced visibility to a quarter of a mile, even making it “zero at times,” per the National Weather Service in Lincoln, Illinois. The height of the dust storm varies by day, the service station said, but can vary to a wall of dust that’s 5,000 to 7,000 feet tall.
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