Two people killed with 20 people injured on Interstate 790

At 6:45 a.m. two tractor-trailers collided with one another that started a chain reaction crash on Interstate 790. Two people driving cars were killed and 20 others were injured and taken to the hospital, four of them were seriously hurt. Tony Sullivan, the fire chief, said that one of the ambulance drivers informed him the seriously injured people were life-threatening.

According to Sgt. Albert Wei of the police department there were a total of four tractor-trailers and 14 cars involved in the accident. One of the tractor-trailers was a tanker hauling diesel fuel. “It was very lucky that it didn’t roll over or dump any fuel or catch fire,” Wei said. The truck part of the tanker was damaged when a car hit it, but the truck driver managed to get it stopped safely along the side of the road.

All five of the fire departments ambulances were on the scene, along with ambulances from four of the nearby city’s fire departments. The “Life Flight” helicopter from Memorial Hospital was also called to the scene to fly two of the worst injured to the trauma center in Statesville, 50 miles away. Sullivan said that his firefighters had to cut the roofs off three of the cars to free the drivers and passengers that were trapped inside.

According to Wei, this accident happened in the northbound lanes of I-790 and closed both the north and southbound lanes. The interstate was still closed at 10 a.m., creating quite a mess for the rush hour traffic. People who normally would have used I-790 had to go on Interstate 690, which backed up traffic for three hours.