An already harsh winter took another trying turn Wednesday, leaving a morning coating of ice on many area roads and expressways that turned some traffic routes into little more than slippery bumper-car tracks.
By mid-morning, when most Chicago-area tollways would normally be shedding their heavy traffic load, Illinois State Police still were sorting through dozens of accidents left by hours of freezing drizzle.
District 15 state police reported more than 50 accidents before 11 a.m. on East-West Tollway (Interstate Highway 88) and North-South Tollway (Interstate Highway 355) in DuPage County and on the Tri-State Tollway (Interstate Highway 294) between 95th Street and O’Hare International Airport in Cook County. Few injuries were reported, but the scattered wrecks caused numerous backups.
“This encompassed the rush hour,” State Police Sgt. Paul Carlos said. “When the ice hit, it was about 5:30 a.m. That’s right when things normally start to pick up.”
Police reported numerous spinouts, including one vehicle that slid into a dividing wall at the York Toll Plaza in Oak Brook. Dyanne Thayer of Woodridge was among those whose vehicles spun and rolled over after hitting ice patches.
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Thayer, 32, escaped with a bump on her head and a sprained hip after her Nissan Pathfinder flipped on northbound I-355 near the I-88 interchange. Her 9-month-old son who was with her was not hurt.
Thayer tried to slow the vehicle while heading into a curve, she said, lost control and flipped when her vehicle struck snow piled on the median.
“Truly, as soon as I headed toward the median I thought, `Holy blank, we’re going to die’ — I didn’t even scream,” she said. “We flipped the first time and the windshield broke, and I remember turning to try to look at my son. Then we flipped again.”
Thayer said police told her the SUV skidded about 20 feet before coming to rest on its roof. Passersby helped Thayer and her son out of the vehicle.
“I just remember screaming, `Get my baby out of the car,'” said Thayer, who will have her son rechecked for injuries Thursday.
State police said another rollover in the area at about the same time sent a male driver to a Downers Grove hospital for treatment of an eye injury.
Interstate 290 was icy for a mile on either side of Illinois Highway 83, contributing to more than a dozen accidents.
A Nissan SUV got hung up on a guardrail on an overpass above Illinois 83 at about 8:20 a.m., forcing authorities to close a stretch of the road for about 10 minutes, said State Police Master Sgt. Don Thomas. The driver and her two young children were not injured, police said.
The conditions were made worse by black ice on some stretches of the expressways, police said. Some spots that looked to be wet actually were frozen over, police said, and some drivers waited too long to slow down.
“People don’t really observe the ice, so it might give them a false sense of security,” Carlos said. “Vehicles [are] traveling too fast for conditions.”
More than 100 pieces of salt-spreading equipment were on the tollways by 10 a.m., police said, but crews sometimes found it difficult to maneuver through clogged roadways.
Elgin police added three extra desk officers Wednesday morning to take accident reports. Police handled more than 30 accidents between 6:30 and 10 a.m., and more than 40 vehicles were towed from accident scenes.
“We were just buried in accidents,” Elgin Lt. Mike Turner said.
Things were no calmer at points south, with police in Naperville reporting nearly 30 accidents by mid-afternoon. Kane County sheriff’s police took more than 80 reports of disabled vehicles and traffic accidents between 5 and 10:30 a.m., a Kane County dispatcher said.
In Lake County, authorities logged 18 accidents and 23 cars in ditches between 7 a.m. and noon. No one was seriously hurt.
Authorities also were challenged in McHenry County, where slick conditions were blamed for a five-car pileup in Crystal Lake.
Most of the rollover crashes were due to excessive speed and snow packed along guardrails and medians that formed ramps for out-of-control cars. The combination apparently contributed to two accidents in Chicago this week that sent vehicles sailing off expressway overpasses onto streets below.
A 48-year-old woman traveling southbound on the Dan Ryan Expressway Tuesday flipped her car over a snow-packed concrete median near the Stevenson Expressway interchange and landed below the road near Halsted Street after she tried to navigate around a stopped vehicle in front of her, said Michelle Tufenkjian, Illinois State Police spokeswoman.
The woman tried to steer her gray Toyota RAV-4 into the left lane and then swerved back into the right lane to avoid a truck traveling in the left lane, police said. Thanks to her seatbelt and her vehicle’s airbags, she suffered only a broken leg and was taken to Cook County Hospital, Tufenkjian said. No one else was injured.
On Wednesday morning, Oscar Escobedo, 32, of Tempe, Ariz., tried to steer his white Ford Crown Victoria clear of an accident on the Stevenson Expressway near Wood Street, Tufenkjian said.
His car ended up flying over a snow-packed guardrail and plunging more than 40 feet to the intersection of 31st and Wood Streets, she said. Escobedo was not injured, she said.