The sheer lack of intelligence some people posses boggles my mind.

I’ll bet at least a few of the people in the accident were texting or talking on the phone, too.

@Shield_of_Achilles Yeah….and a three year old had to die because of them. That just makes me want to….I don’t know. Do something violent.

I have answered many traffic crashes involving the same situation. the really bad part is working an accident like this and having to keep an eye out for another idiotic driver like you have described. i did this one time. saw this pickup truck coming at full speed ahead. i grabbed the wrecker driver and shoved him behind his wrecker and i joined him. sure enough, the pickup truck smashed into the wrecker and thank God we were behind it. some people are just too relaxed behind the wheel of an auto and especially behind the wheel of suvs. i think because suvs sit above other vehicles on the road, they give the drivers a false sense of security….that this cannot happen to me. driving in a zero visibility fog is like driving on the interstate with blinders over your eyes. why do they do this? stupidity! they are stupid. i call it like i see it and a person has to be utterly stupid to drive even 30 mph in a dense fog. i am thankful someone put the sign out in the road for you to see. there should have been a police car there, instead of the sign, to warn and slow people down. wonder why there was no police car there on the interstate?

I don’t think being stupid has anything to do with it. People are just careless and think they are indestructible. People might have been on the phone, they also might have been switching radio stations or yelling at their kids.

This question is a bit callous. Isn’t the accident, death and injury enough?

reminds me a lot of people in our area who seem to think ice slicked roads are the same as rain slicked roads then wonder (if they’re still alive) what happened.

@tinyfaery It was sheer stupidity. It could have been avoided had people been using just a little common sense, starting with the tow truck driver. The fact that a child died because of it makes me want to scream.

Once again the tragic loss of a life not yet lived. What annoys me is they call wrecks like this an “accident.” I disagree, as is clearly the case here, it’s always someones fault not by accident.

I’ve had this discussion before with people I considered to be otherwise knowledgeable and intelligent. Some of them say (and I can hardly believe it, but they explain it so carefully) that if you encounter a patch of dense fog or smoke or snow that totally obscures your vision… then… you need to maintain speed so that the guy behind you doesn’t plow into you when he encounters it, too. Some of them actually believe that you would be responsible for setting off the chain reaction if you slowed to a reasonable and prudent speed too swiftly.

And that makes a certain amount of stupid sense, if you imagine that the guy behind you is… as stupid as you would be for doing that. And too many times I guess you’d be right about that; that guy behind you must be a clown to not slow down or stop when he can’t see.

One of the guys who said this was a private pilot. He likens driving into dense fog as if he were flying into a cloud, “You can’t just slow down your flying!” he exclaims. And I agree with him there, to a point. But he’s not flying on an interstate highway with planes lined up ahead and behind him in the same path. He has Air Traffic Control supposedly monitoring other planes in the air near him. He had / has pretty certain knowledge that the cloud cover was at a certain ceiling, and how high it goes. He has to maintain a certain minimum speed just to stay in the air. Those are all valid reasons—for flying through clouds at speed. They don’t make a lick of sense for driving on a highway in traffic when you can’t see to stop in time if you need to.

My dad always taught me when I was driving—he drilled me over and over—that if you get rear-ended it’s the other guy’s fault. So I drive that way myself: I’m not going to be the stupid other guy who rear-ends someone because he couldn’t see and control his vehicle in time to slow down. I drive at a speed where I can see the guy in front of me (as long as he’s not speeding) and leave enough room to stop NOW if he hits something or stops unexpectedly. And if I can’t see the guy in front of me because he’s driving too fast—or there is no one— then I drive no faster than I can stop within my field of vision. And I watch my rear-view mirror to see if I need to dive off the road.

I hate like hell to slow down to under 30 MPH on an interstate, and when things get that bad for more than a mile or so, then I’m off the road entirely and ASAP. If I drive into a dense fogbank, smoke screen, white-out snow or downpour of rain, I slow to where I need to be, make sure my lights are on, and brace for impact—from the rear. I’m not rear-ending anyone.

@wonderingwhy I clearly remember the first time I first realized how stupid people behind the wheel can be. I was 16, and had been driving for about a year. This guy was giving me a ride home from a party. It was icy-slick out, but he didn’t compensate for it…it was like he didn’t realize it! Well, we were coming up to a stop sign and I said, “You need to slow down…..”
He says, “Why??” and didn’t. A second later he hits his brakes to stop at the sign and slid right on through. You know what he said, “Wow! There’s something wrong with my brakes!” At that moment I decided I would never ride with another person ever again. I’d be the one driving, and for the most part, that’s how it is….. except @CyanoticWasp I’m riding with you!

We have had so much fog lately, haven’t we, @Val123. Being a lifetime Kansan, I don’t recall ever seeing so much!

People drive in the damn fog like they do in the snow…like idiots! Slow down a little. Where ever you are headed is still gonna be there if you are a couple minutes late!

I hope the next time you all make a mistake someone calls you stupid. Especially if you lose your child in the process. Gross.

Actually, looking at the photos for the first time, I was very heartened to see that so many of the vehicles there had no front-end damage. That’s a good sign; at least those drivers were able to stop in time, so they were driving safely for their own (and their vehicle’s) capability. That actually made me feel pretty good.

It’s when I see photos of pile-ups like this and every car looks like an accordion that I get sick about how everyone there was, if not ‘stupid’, at least ‘unsafe’.

I don’t live on the mainland, but I always assumed when this happened that (a) the visibility was extremely poor, and (b) that it happened on a wide, long, straight expanse of a road that typically is never congested such that people are planning on traversing a long distance (50+ miles maybe) and so use the cruise control feature and are lulled into a kind of trance. If I drove the same route everyday, a 100 miles at a time I’d probably do the same thing. It is human nature to let your guard down in a familiar situation.

Why are you assuming these people were “so freaking STUPID” when you weren’t there when the accident happened? You think all 25 drivers who got in the accident were all idiots and you know better than they do?

I have been driving in conditions that were perfectly clear and the fog came on so suddenly that my visibility was cut to zero in an instant. Had there been more traffic, there would have simply been no way to avoid an accident. I was just lucky. And I was not driving recklessly; even at 55mph the right conditions can make an accident unavoidable.

Why are you on such a high horse? The stupidity of others and your superiority by comparison seems to be a common theme for you.

@nikipedia Because of the way the majority of people drive! They don’t THINK. Last night, coming back, we encountered patches of dense fog and Rick slowed down. People were flying by us at the speed limit, 70….you couldn’t see 10 feet in front of you! In Kansas City it wasn’t patchy fog that morning. It was solid fog.

I used to live in Germany. It’s foggy there a lot.

It was a “normal” day to hear the morning traffic report about the various regional autobahnen that were clogged with 50, 60, 100+ car pileups.

The conventional wisdom that was shared there, and I think applies here, is that: if you survive a highway crash in a foggy area, run away from your car and away from the highway.

@robmandu I’d be scared that someone would hit my car as I was getting out….

@robmandu We don’t get fog like that here…I mean, we have over the last three days, but normally we just don’t get that much. You have much more experience than I in this…in your opinion, how can those accidents be avoided?

just before christmas we had some major floods in cumbria.

a friend of mine works for mountain rescue and they helped out the police by manning closed roads and giving advice to drivers.

on the first day he walked down a line of standing traffic and of the 20 cars he went to every single one had the following dialogue.

Whats going on?

Major flooding the roads closed

oh, but the sat nav says i need to take this road

yeah, but the roads closed so you’ll have to turn back

But i need to get to insert destination here

sorry the road is closed, its flooded no traffic can get through.

but the sat nav says…

repeat ad infinitum

Every car he went to, and NONE of them were listening to the local radio… i mean i’m in stand still traffic, there is a guy walking car to car to give advice… i’d at least tune to the local radio.

some drivers get in their car and its their own little world.

@Pcrecords That’s insane! And reminds me of a question I want to ask.

My nephew was nearly involved in that particular accident. He narrowly missed getting hit and hitting someone else. He said that many drivers were passing him like he was standing still. Conditions were extremely foggy and visibility was probably less than ten feet. That type of road condition requires extreme caution.

@Rufus_T_Firefly Thanks so much for your comments. I was starting to regret the way I worded the question because….well, I just was. But perhaps the whole thing could have been avoided if people just used common sense.

I’m interested in more details about your nephew. How did he avoid the wreck?

@Val123 – He just barely avoided it. His truck is equipped with an array of extra-bright fog lights that he uses when he goes hunting. and that may have helped to alert some of the oncoming drivers. Other than that, it was probably just a case of pure luck. As for common sense, it is always welcome, but even ten or twenty MPH would have been too fast for those conditions.

@Rufus_T_Firefly Yeah. And you said people were passing him like he was standing still. That just floors me.

@Val123 – We humans are a weird bunch, aren’t we? How in the heck did we ever survive for this long?

@Rufus_T_Firefly I don’t know!!

I was starting to feel bad for assuming people were moving at ridiculously high speeds when they couldn’t see anything but just looking at the damage here, how fast would you say these two vehicles, at least, were going?

http://i212.photobucket.com/albums/cc207/Dutchcat1/Misc/wreck_3standaloneprod_affiliate81.jpg

http://i212.photobucket.com/albums/cc207/Dutchcat1/Misc/wreck_4standaloneprod_affiliate81.jpg

Yes, people can be that stupid. Fog-related massive freeway pileup happens in Germany as well.

Vehicles are too comfortable, quiet and smooth. There’s little feedback to the driver of speed, no reference that is easily processed to trigger the senses and judgment. One fine example would be the motorcycles that make a ton of noise. You hear a piece of shit sound and wonder if it’s your car, then look around for the likely cause – there’s a dirty Harley right in your blind spot. But you saw it no problem, because it was snorting and popping the whole time. Every motorcycle should sound like that too, because I’ll always look. Maybe if the floor of the vehicle was missing, people would realize how fast they’re actually traveling.