One person was killed and nine were injured after a 14-vehicle crash north of Calgary late Tuesday night, the RCMP said in a statement.
Police responded to a stretch of Highway 2, the Queen Elizabeth II Highway, near Highway 72 about two kilometers north of Veterans Boulevard shortly after 10 p.m. The scene is north of Airdrie, which is about 20 kilometers north of Calgary.
“Preliminary information has determined that a commercial vehicle including a trailer, along with five sedans, four pickup trucks, three SUVs and a passenger van were involved in this incident,” the RCMP said in a statement Wednesday in the morning
“Details of the cause of the collision are still under investigation, with the main factors appearing to be weather and road conditions. As a result of this collision, injuries were reported resulting in nine passengers in several vehicles were transported by ground ambulance to area hospitals for various life-threatening conditions.”
A witness to the event says he dodged a bullet.
“Very fortunate,” Mike Crampton told CBC News in a phone interview.
“I was playing board games with a friend and if I had left a couple of minutes earlier, I probably would have been there.”
Crampton was heading north towards his home in Didsbury when he came across the scene.
“I honestly wasn’t sure where I was on the freeway, the fog was so thick you couldn’t really see any landmarks. I pulled into an exit lane thinking I was going to get off the freeway. Turns out that’s where the Tim. Horton and Esso and Humpty used to be, right next to Crossfield,” he said.
“There was a truck with a bulldozer that was on fire. Ten, 12 vehicles just piled up. There were a lot of people standing around. There were people who were dealing with minor injuries that I could see. I’ve never seen a fire like that. I can’t imagine how this started and it was hard for them to put out the fire.”
The police have not identified the fatal victim.
RCMP warned motorists to expect hours-long delays near that stretch of road.