The vehicles lined up one after another, a seemingly endless stretch of bent metal and flashing lights.
All along Highway 400 Sunday afternoon crashes mounted in a horrific chain of events that forced closures in both directions for hours and left an astounding total of more than 100 vechiles damaged in its wake.
Most of the carnage occurred between
Highway 9 near Newmarket and
Highway 89 at Cookstown.
Several collisions, occurring in both directions, caused at least one officer surveying the mess to dub the stretch a "wrecking yard."
Roughly 50 people were taken to hospital for various injuries, but amazingly none of them were determined to be life-threatening. Many of the accidents were blamed on significant ice forming along the road's surface during a weekend deep freeze. Particularly up north where snow squall warnings were in effect,
Ontario Provincial Police and witnesses said whiteout conditions, which picked up around noon, contributed heavily to the pileups.
"Numerous whiteouts came in and you couldn't see 100 feet in front of you. Then one vehicle after another started sliding on the road. It was a chain reaction," said P.C. Dave Woodford.
"There was a whiteout, all the cars were piled in front of us and we went into it," added Bruce Gillespie, one of the many drivers affected by the crashes. "We only saw it at the last second."
Emergency crews did their best to respond to the huge number of vehicles and people involved and transport individuals who no longer have a car to their homes. A parking lot near Highway 88 was used by OPP to store damaged vehicles and complete collision reports.
A centre guard rail had to be cut out in order for functioning cars to head in the other direction, meaning the road couldn't be fully cleared until well into Sunday night when crews had replaced the essential safety precaution.
Ironically, the countless accidents reportedly led to great examples of teamwork, Woodford said.
"You see a lot of people sort of making friends that were involved in the collisions, people they didn't know before and they're out just telling their stories and sometimes that's what they have to do just to get their minds off of what happened."
There were especially heartwarming tales coming from the OPP surrounding the story of a tractor trailer driver who used every ounce of his driving ability to narrowly avoid slamming into several vehicles that had already stopped.
"I was going to rear-end somebody, guaranteed," long-haul driver Glenn Wright said. "So I just saw it, reacted and went for it."
"That's the one that most people were talking about," Woodford added. "This tractor trailer did happen to see everything happening just at the last minute and he just drove his truck ... right off the road into a ditch into a clump of trees."
Unfortunately, Sunday driving difficulties were hardly limited to Highway 400. Poor driving conditions are also being blamed for traffic problems further east at Highway 404. The stretch between
Bloomington Road and
Aurora Road was also shut down after whiteouts and a string of serious collisions.
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