Virden, Illinois. 1 May 2023

Deadly I-55 dust storm: The ‘hellish’ minutes scores of drivers spent battling a 200-foot wall of farm soil

VIRDEN, Ill. — By all accounts, Monday, May 1, started as a beautiful morning. Clear skies. Cool. The gusting wind out of the northwest, not uncommon for a central Illinois landscape covered by vast farm fields and little else, was the only sign of what was to come.

Around 10:50 a.m., Jim and Pam Dawson were about 30 miles from their home in Hillsboro, heading north on Interstate 55 to a Springfield funeral home to make arrangements for Jim’s brother, who died two days earlier from a massive stroke.

In a nearby car, Jane Flanders was on the first leg of an eight-hour trip back to suburban Minneapolis after a weekend spent with her niece’s family in Mount Olive.

Across the grassy median, Cambria Underwood was 5 miles from the Farmersville exit, where she was due to drop off a 3-year-old boy at her mom’s home day care.

Dozens of other drivers zipped along the busy stretch of interstate connecting St. Louis and Springfield.

“All of a sudden it got thick and dark,” Jim Dawson, 67, remembered. “And boom, it was over.”

A wall of dirt 200 feet high engulfed the interstate. Suddenly blinded and panicked drivers desperately tried to slam on their brakes or veer off the road for safety, only to find none.

Vehicles smashed into each other, some with such force that each collision sounded like an explosion. A half-dozen cars and semis caught fire in the northbound lanes, their charred remains barely recognizable once the flames were extinguished.

In the end, the 84-vehicle pileup killed eight and injured at least 36 others.

[ The I-55 dust storm crash took lives, shattered families. Here are some of their stories.  ]

“I’ve seen accidents before, but I’ve never seen the magnitude of what was here,” said Jason Martin, who, at the time, was police chief in Divernon, 5 miles north of the crash site. “Cars. Trucks. Semis. People hurt. People lying in the median.”

Authorities believe the cloud of dirt likely came from soil swept off recently planted farms by wind gusts that topped 50 mph.

In the days that followed, some have questioned whether changes to farming practices, along with better storm tracking and alerts from forecasters and police, could prevent another catastrophe.

[ Fatal I-55 dust storm crash puts focus on Illinois farmers: ‘We haven’t advanced … but we can’ ]

Others have called what happened that day a “perfect storm,” unprecedented in its size, its staying power and the carnage it caused.

“It was like everything came together to leave this hellish episode,” Martin said. “There’s no other way to explain it besides hellish.”

State police said it would take months to piece together the exact sequence of events leading up to the crash. For victim families, survivors, first responders and residents of the tiny, close-knit communities that dot the region, the mental and emotional wounds will undoubtedly take much longer to heal.

read more  https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-interstate-55-crash-aftermath-survivors-20230616-7dl3xm4uurfmbjfi5s322skola-htmlstory.html

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