Bad Wrecks on the I-80

These days the part of Iowa I know best is I-80 between Davenport and Iowa City, where I go for cochlear implant surgery like I did yesterday. I was a little nervous, because it has been cold and icy here, but the roads were fine and we made it to the surgery on time, at about 9 30 am. I got through it successfully but it took me a while to get out and my wife was driving us back east to Illinois, and we stopped for gas in West Branch.

I used to live in West Branch! I lived at Scattergood Friends School, about three miles east of West Branch, for a couple of years in the eighties. Very nice and interesting years. But I didn't know anyone at the Casey's; it's possible it wasn't even there in the eighties.

What I haven't told you is that there was a huge accident on I-80, right there east of West Branch, on Saturday. More than sixty accidents were involved. People were delayed for as much as seven hours. Traffic backed up all the way back into Coralville and the hospital had to decide who to treat first, with so many people coming in. One person had to be extracted from a car but miraculously nobody was killed.

By Monday evening at 5 o'clock a lot of the trucks still hadn't been removed from the roadside; there were also various cars in the ditches going both ways, with a kind of green ribbon/tape on them, presumably signifying that they could be left there until removed, and were not an emergency. Some of the trucks were right on the shoulder, and two of them actually had their blinkers on. This alone was enough to slow people down and so, though I blamed rubbernecking, it was small wonder that the heavy traffic going east a few miles beyond West Branch slowed down considerably and backed up almost to West Branch. We were aggrieved at the ten minute (or so) delay but were lucky it wasn't more and could hardly imagine a seven-hour delay on a much colder night on Saturday. Also, the roads, for us on Monday, were clear, whereas on Saturday I imagine there was a terrible combination of clear and icy, just bad enough for sixty cars and trucks to go slamming into sixty more on some stretch of that road.

So as we inched along we became rubberneckers by necessity, and saw the innards of smashed up trucks right up against the roadside, and the ones with the blinkers on, which had back wheels hanging over the ditch and couldn't be moved so easily, or so quickly. Now this was scary to me, because I have a son who is a regional trucker in Arizona/California, but is becoming a 50-state trucker soon enough. And what is it with the trucks? Some people blamed young truckers carrying "dry loads" and driving too fast. Presumably all sixty were driving too fast, if they were crashing into sixty others. And sometimes you can drive smart and careful and the people in front of you or behind you make you into a statistic (or hospital admission) anyway.

This I think is not unknown to Iowa. Several people commented on how common it was on I-80 and that is in fact my experience, one of the scariest things about living in the state. It's partly because you get up on 80 to make good time and you go as fast as you can and are allowed to, and the weather can change or become deadly somewhat abruptly; things just freeze. Water, cold, snow, frozen, bingo, cars and trucks off the road. Some of them flip. Some bash into each other. It's not pretty.

That's all. I go back Jan. 9 and again Jan. 25. Pray for me; January is not generally any better than December.