IN THE MIDDLE: Truckers averted tragedy in I-80 wreck years ago

Posted 4/22/15

My husband, Gary, and I and our two oldest sons — then preschool age — were traveling east on Interstate 80 in March 1980. We were riding with my brother-in-law’s parents, Claude and Ivy Pearce of Laramie, and Claude was driving.

We had …

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IN THE MIDDLE: Truckers averted tragedy in I-80 wreck years ago

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Over the weekend, I watched several horrifying videos of Thursday’s huge pileup on Interstate 80 west of Cheyenne, and with dismay, I learned on Monday of a second tragic pileup west of Laramie. I can imagine — all too vividly — how terrifying both of those experiences were. In fact, I lived through a similar experience, but with a very different result, thanks to truckers who were listening to their radios and came to our rescue. 

My husband, Gary, and I and our two oldest sons — then preschool age — were traveling east on Interstate 80 in March 1980. We were riding with my brother-in-law’s parents, Claude and Ivy Pearce of Laramie, and Claude was driving.

We had traveled from Evanston to Rawlins in good weather and on dry roads. But, when we crested the top of a hill near Elk Mountain between Rawlins and Laramie, the highway changed abruptly from a dry surface to sheet ice. The sun and traffic had warmed the highway earlier in the day. The wind, seemingly ever-present there, blew loose snow from the fields beside I-80 onto the warm surface of the road, where it melted, then froze when the temperature cooled, creating an extremely slippery coat of ice. 

Because the change from good road to sheet ice happened instantly and at the top of a hill, Claude had virtually no time to react. He lost control of the car — a heavy, 1970-something model that would be referred to later as a “boat” — and it began to spin clockwise, spinning like a top as it traveled down the long, straight hill. 

To Claude’s credit, he didn’t panic, and he had almost regained control of the car when a tractor-trailer rig drove up to our right, its driver also unable to slow down because of the ice. As the truck passed us, the spinning car’s front end spun underneath the back end of the semi trailer and struck its axle, hitting hard enough that it bent the trailer’s axle and crushed the frame of car around its right-front tire. After the impact, the car’s rotation reversed, and the disabled vehicle spun counterclockwise until it stopped on the right side of the highway, facing the way we had come and with the front end not quite out of the traffic lane. 

That was just the beginning of our terrifying ordeal. I got out of the car to get our sons’ snowsuits from the trunk to keep the boys warm, and the highway was so slick that I barely managed to keep from falling by holding onto the car. The temperature had fallen, and the wind was so brutal that we would have frozen to death in a short amount of time if we’d gotten out of the car. This was before the advent of cell phones, so we had no way to communicate or call for help.

To make matters worse, we had a full view of the hill we had just come over, and each time another driver crested the hill, they experienced the same thing we had. There wasn’t as much traffic on I-80 then as there is now, thank heavens. Still, for about 20 minutes — which seemed like a lifetime — we watched in fear and horror as trucks jackknifed and cars spun, some righting themselves and traveling on, and others careening off the highway on one side or the other. One big, white car —I remember it as a Cadillac — hurtled toward us, completely out of control, and I saw no way for the driver to avoid hitting us broadside. I saw the terror in the eyes of the couple in the car as they also realized the near certainty of an impending crash. But, by some miracle, the car plummeted into a snowdrift in front of us instead. I still have no idea how that happened, because I had buried my face in Gary’s shoulder and was waiting for the impact which, thankfully, never came. 

Here is where my story is very different from the recent pileups: After a while, truckers used their radios to advise the truckers behind them of the hazard, and those truckers started slowing way down before the top of the hill, then leading eastbound traffic slowly down that hazardous stretch of Interstate 80. 

Those truckers helped to save our lives. In addition, the trucker whose trailer we hit stopped at the bottom of the hill and walked a considerable distance through treacherous conditions to make sure we were OK. Eventually, a highway patrolman arrived, and he pulled someone over to give us a ride to Laramie, where we lived at the time. 

Gary and I, our sons and the Pearces are some of very few people who could say they were in a car that tangled with a semi and came out of the experience without so much as a bruise. But the memories still haunt me. Thirty-five years later, I am still thankful that God and some diligent truckers were watching out for us.

It’s unfortunate that the truckers involved in the series of I-80 crashes on Thursday and Monday either didn’t have enough time, or didn’t listen to their radios, to enable them to take similar measures to prevent that horrible pileup. While there were no fatalities Thursday, two people were killed in Monday’s pileup. Many people are hurting and will relive that trauma for days, weeks and months to come, and the economic damage certainly will add up to many millions of dollars.

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