By Stanley B. Chambers Jr.
News & Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina)
MORRISVILLE, N.C. — Witnesses of a Friday accident that tied up traffic on the Triangle’s busiest highway for hours saw an explosion that sent smoke and flames skyward and engulfed a tractor-trailer and two vehicles pinned underneath. One driver died.
Jeff Szymanski, who heard the crash and tried to help the victims, said he “walked into hell.”
“It was a horrible scene. I don’t want to see this again,” he said.
Thousands of motorists were forced off Interstate 40 near Airport Boulevard and onto local roads in Cary, Morrisville and west Raleigh after the accident involving eight vehicles killed Nemeth F. Sanders and sent five others to hospitals, three in critical condition.
Sanders, 43, of the Nash County town of Bailey, was traveling east when the tractor-trailer crossed the median in front of him. Sanders was a forest-fire equipment operator, using tractor plows to battle wildfires in Wilson County for the state Division of Forest Resources. Sanders, who had worked for the department since June 2006, was returning from pump school in the western part of state, said department spokesman Brian Haines.
“It is a great loss to the fire service family,” he said. “He will be thoroughly missed, certainly by the people he worked with.”
Authorities had not released the names of the other victims Friday night.
Two eastbound lanes are expected to reopen sometime today after Department of Transportation workers have repaired damaged pavement and guardrails. Westbound lanes reopened about 5 p.m. Friday.
Surrounding roads were clogged for hours as motorists -- weary from 94-degree heat -- sought alternate routes. Kelley Crawford, 26, who was traveling on Interstate 540, looked down onto I-40 from an overpass and saw cars turning around.
And then Crawford saw the wreckage.
“You just knew in your heart it was a really bad day for someone and their family,” she said.
At 12:51 p.m., a black Dodge pickup collided with a red Chevrolet pickup pulling a trailer on westbound I-40 near the Airport Boulevard exit, the state Highway Patrol said. The red pickup then collided with a tractor-trailer. The impact sent the big rig over the metal guardrail into eastbound traffic, where it struck a Dodge Neon with a pregnant woman and her son inside. A Nissan Altima and the Dodge pickup driven by Sanders then slammed into the trailer, which caused the explosion.
The woman and her son were taken to Duke Hospital with serious injuries, the Highway Patrol said. The tractor-trailer driver was taken to the N.C. Jaycee Burn Center in Chapel Hill with serious injuries. The drivers of the Nissan and the black pickup were taken to WakeMed with nonlife-threatening injuries. The driver of the Chevrolet was not injured.
The drivers of a dump truck that sideswiped the tractor-trailer and a Chevrolet Impala that traveled through the flames and into a ditch were not injured, the patrol said.
One witness told troopers a tire from the black Dodge blew out, according to Highway Patrol Sgt. Margaret Landon. That may have caused the chain-reaction accident, but Landon said authorities are still figuring out what happened.
After hearing the explosion, Szymanski, who was eating lunch nearby, ran though some woods and jumped over a fence, thinking he would see a plane crash. He first saw the burning tractor-trailer and then its driver wandering nearby with burns on his hands and arms. Szymanski, 49, then saw the driver of the Nissan sitting on the ground, apparently in shock.
The accident happened in front of Brian Blake, 34, who was heading home to Nashville, Tenn. “It was something you don’t want to see, something you’d prefer to be a fantasy on TV,” he said.
Mark Bell, a former volunteer firefighter who was seconds behind the tractor-trailer, tried to help the pregnant woman and her son before he was overcome by heat.
“It was much more difficult to leave the side of a conscious, panicked victim and watch her suffer from a distance with the threat of fire,” he said.
It was hard to see anything with so much smoke in the area, said David Tyree, 25, who was merging onto I-40 west from Airport Boulevard when the wreck happened behind him.
“The whole truck was on fire, everything was on fire,” he said. “You couldn’t see the rig at first. You couldn’t really see the two cars until they put the fire out.”
The black smoke was visible for miles, said Adam Rust, 38, who was stuck in traffic for more than an hour. When he saw the extent of the damage, he thought it was one of the worst wrecks he had seen.
“It was one of those accidents you see and say, this is not on the normal accident scale,” he said. “It’s beyond that.”
The smell of charred metal filled the air as smoke rose from the wreckage. Several agencies responded, including firefighters from Raleigh-Durham International Airport, Cary, Morrisville, Raleigh and Durham.
The Dodge Neon was destroyed. The two other eastbound vehicles and the tractor trailer were charred in the blaze. The heat caused the 18-wheeler’s trailer, which was empty, to peel open.
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Staff writers Toby Coleman, Rachel Carter, Chuck Liddy, Peggy Lim and Marlon A. Walker contributed to this report.