This Snowy Traffic Jam Went To Hell Seriously Quickly

When several cars start to slide toward this traffic jam in Canada, it's clear things are about to go south...

11 Jan 2017

Highway 401 in Ontario, Canada was the scene of a huge pile-up this week, and the whole thing was caught on camera.

When the first sliding car at the 1min 30sec mark comes into view it’s clear where proceedings are headed, but the speed at which things go wrong - accelerated by the appearance of an out of control truck - is pretty shocking to watch.

Thankfully no one was fatally injured in the wreck, but according to CBC News several people were taken to hospital.

You can’t help but wonder if it might have been avoided if people were using their hazard lights…

Growing up on a diet of World Rally Championship highlights and lengthy Gran Turismo 2 sessions, a life in cars was as good as inevitable for Matt.

Comments

eurobeat intensifies

This one

Ahh, the Takumi wannabes.
Always ends up the same

On the other hand, frozen jam tastes pretty good…

I sense a lack of winter tyres and common sense

Ice dude, ice.

winter tires are mandatory in Ontario

Do you even Canada? If you don’t have winter tires here then you’re doomed. Some people even keep them on in the summer! That’s how bad it is here. xD

I bet those driver felt like this.

Lower speeds and always turn on headlights in these weather conditions… Or you’re asking for it..

Yes why were they going so fast?! makes no sense to me, obviously they would end up crashing with those speeds and no hazard lights on at all.

Zero to chaos: realy quick

You rang?

That’s why you turn on your lights in the first place, and even more important, if you stand still on the motorway you turn on your fking hazard lights. Seriously, are we Germans the only ones with commonsense when it comes to driving a car? If we (atleast most Germans) drive up to a traffic jam, even if it’s not a complete jam we turn on our hazard lights, at least the people in the last row, especially in bad weather conditions.

Exactly. it takes no effort to do and increases safety by so much. You can see a jam hundreds of meters ahead because people but on their hazard lights.

The trucker be like: “MOVEE!!”

So I thought I would give some context here because people think this would be easily avoided. This storm was a lake affect storm, where for hundreds of miles east and west of this town (Bowemanville) the roads were clear and dry, and this one town got hit with around 8 inches of snow from out of nowhere. I was driving home with my mom and we were about 10 minutes behind this, we were lucky enough to get off the highway and detour around it, however everyone was taken by surprise as this wheather came from out of nowhere. Yes Canadians are used to harsher winter conditions, however nothing is like this. They had to close the highway on both directions and as we’d gotten around the mess and back into the clear of things, there was 15 Km of stopped traffic waiting to get off the highway. This was a crazy and unexpected storm that took even the best of us by surprise, lucky nobody got seriously injured.

It was really weird where I live. My dad is the guys that plow the roads boss. He had a grader out all night. 2:00 am it started snowing. 3:00 am he couldnt keep up. 12:00 pm it changed to freezing rain.