Police: Ice causes 50-vehicle pileup on Interstate 84

BAKER CITY, Ore. – Ice is believed to be the cause of a freeway pileup involving more than a dozen tractor-trailers Saturday morning in Eastern Oregon, police said.

The pileup left a long stretch of Interstate 84 closed for most of the day as crews worked to clean spilled diesel fuel and clear 50 vehicles that were either damaged or stranded.

Four people were taken to hospitals with injuries ranging from minor to serious, but there were no fatalities, Oregon State Police Sgt. Kyle Hove said. The crash occurred shortly before 5 a.m. east of Baker City, about 130 miles northwest of Boise.

Hove arrived on the scene to find “a sheet of ice” on the road. Troopers still are investigating, but Hove said he believes it was a chain-reaction crash.

“A couple of the trucks came upon the black ice, and they jackknifed and crashed into each other. And it just continued to escalate until we had a total of 50 vehicles in one scene,” Hove told the Associated Press by phone.

There were several separate collisions over a stretch of about three-quarters of a mile in the eastbound lanes, Hove said. About 20 vehicles were damaged, many of them tractor-trailers, and several spilled their loads, he said.

Two trucks were transporting hazardous materials. Their cargo did not spill, but crews had to clean up diesel from the trucks’ fuel tanks.