911 calls reveal fear, urgency in Fort Worth I-35 pileup. ‘I’m underneath an 18-wheeler’
A Fort Worth nurse was driving to work on the early morning hours of Feb. 11 when she was hit by a couple of vehicles and then an 18-wheeler.
When she could, she calmly called 911.
“There’s accidents all over and they just keep coming and there’s people on the expressway and they need to get off,” she said, describing the scene. “They just keep hitting and hitting and hitting.”
The nurse was one of dozens of people who called 911 at some point during a crash that ended in a 133-car pileup just north of downtown. The roads were icy that morning, causing cars and 18-wheelers to slam into each other. Six people died and more than 65 were injured in some way.
Two hours worth of 911 calls were obtained by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram through an open records request.
The calls, at first, were calm, with reports that five or six vehicles that had crashed. Then they became more frantic. In some audio, clashing metal could be heard in the background.
One man said he was stuck in his car, which was underneath an 18-wheeler.
“I’m trying to get out of my car, I can’t get out of my car,” he told the dispatcher. “Maybe I can get around the other side.”
People could be heard in the background, breaking the man’s car window in an effort to reach him.
One woman was hit by another car after calling for help.
“Can you hurry?” she frantically asked the dispatcher.
Another woman just shouted “What do we do?” as dispatch answered.
“It’s terrible, I’m in the regular lane and in the express lane people are coming down the hill and they can’t slow down and it’s just terrible,” one man described to a dispatcher. “People are driving like regular and then hitting ice.”
A dozen others also reported icy conditions and said their car began to slide before they hit someone.
Firefighters reported slick roads that required them to find cat litter to spread on the highway. One firefighter used his personal vehicle to deliver pallets of litter to the highway because firetrucks and other engines were already at the crash site.
Crews arriving on scene were unable to get to trapped motorists because of the heavy ice. Firefighters began to walk tools and other equipment to the crash site and later told the Star-Telegram that they had to walk on top of vehicles to get to others.
A frantic woman told a dispatcher from an in-vehicle security and emergency service that she could hear people screaming near her car. She believed they were trapped but she wasn’t able to see because her airbags had deployed.
“I don’t know how people are maybe even alive in the car next to me,” she said. “There’s just so many.”
Later a dispatcher tried to reach man whose wife had called 911 looking for him. The wife wasn’t sure where he was but believed he might be in the crash. The dispatcher called him twice, but he didn’t immediately respond.
“We’ll make sure we get to him,” the dispatcher said.
This story was originally published March 17, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
