One motorist was injured in one of a series of three wrecks that happened during white-out conditions Tuesday morning along a stretch of Route 119 near the border of Westmoreland and Fayette counties.
A PennDOT plow on hand to clear snow from the highway was involved in the last of the crashes, according to state police.
East Huntingdon Volunteer Fire Department crews responded to each of the wrecks between 10 and 11 a.m., beginning with a car crashing into a guardrail while entering from Route 819 onto Route 119 in East Huntingdon.
While Mt. Pleasant volunteer firefighters took over traffic control at that scene, East Huntingdon crews continued south to a three-car crash that caused temporary closure of the Route 119 southbound lanes near the Fayette County line.
“One car wrecked and spun out, another one spun out and a third car got bumped,” said Scott Olsen, safety officer for the East Huntingdon department. One of the involved motorists had minor injuries and was taken by ambulance to a local hospital, he said.
Firefighters shut down southbound traffic because the wrecked cars were blocking the slow lane and part of the passing lane, Olsen said.
“We had it shut down for a good while,” he said. “We kept the road closed until PennDOT came through.”
Alicia Miller, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Pittsburgh, said a band of rapidly falling lake-effect snow, tied to lakes Erie and Superior, was moving along the Interstate 70 corridor at about the time of the reported Route 119 white-out.
“It was lingering lake-effect snow,” dumping 5 inches or more on the ground at various locations, she said. “It was dropping an inch an hour for a while.
“It was pretty intense. The visibility at times was a quarter mile or less.”
‘A total white-out’
Olsen estimated that the highway was covered by up to 3 inches of snow.
“It came pretty quickly,” he said of the burst of snow. “When we were coming south, there was nothing until we got to the Route 819 bridge (over Route 119), and then it was a total white-out.
“There was a lot of slipping and sliding. Other (drivers) had slid off the road and bumped the guardrail. It was pretty bad.”
As they headed back north on Route 119, returning from the three-car crash, East Huntingdon units happened upon another wreck: a pickup truck crashed into a pole at the intersection of McClure Road in Fayette County’s Upper Tyrone Township. The East Huntingdon firefighters remained there until they were relieved by the responding Everson Volunteer Fire Company.
No one was injured in that crash, but the pickup driver indicated he’d been forced over by a snow plow, Everson fire Chief Jeff King said. One of the northbound lanes was closed temporarily.
Trooper Kalee Barnhart, public information officer with the state police station in Uniontown, confirmed that the pickup driver and another witness reported a PennDOT snow plow was involved in the wreck but did not make contact with the pickup. Investigators were working to identify the driver of the plow, Barnhart said.
The pickup was heavily damaged and had to be towed.
