Eventful day on I-10

Well, yesterday was a day unlike I've had in awhile, or maybe ever. Kristi was in town to spend a few days before I started two months of Emergency Medicine, as well as before she moves back to College Station to start her first year of Medical School there. The intention was for yesterday to be a lazy day, maybe go to a mall, maybe get her haircut, and just take it from there. We had plans to meet our good Houston friends Susie and Paul for dinner and a movie later that night.

So to pass the time, we decide to go to a local mall here in Houston which is located on Interstate 10, or the Katy Freeway for locals. It's a nice mall, and we've been there several times together, especially when she's been wanting to get her haircut. Traffic was moving fine until we were about 2 miles away from the mall on I-10, when we notice this big cloud of black smoke looming in front of us on the highway, still about 2 miles away. When traffic starts slowing down, we start getting kind of worried, and then without much warning, it grinds to an absolute halt. The HOV lane also comes to a complete stop as well. At this point, we can see the black smoke getting worse and worse and nothing continues to move. It isn't much longer before we hear the screeching sirens of multiple fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars/motorcycles, as well as multiple helicopters arriving overhead. After not moving an inch for half an hour people in their cars all around are getting very antsy and frustrated. Some left their cars, some were walking their dogs, some were just sitting or standing on the freeway barricades. By the time some of the lanes started moving a little forwards, one guy in his car had completely passed out. His lane cleared in front of him and people were going crazy honking their horns and even running out to bang on his window to get him to move.

In another instance, a car had apparently stalled in the HOV lane while idling and there was a group of people surrounding it apparently trying to lift it up to move it as close to the side as they could to allow other people around. At first I didn't know what they were trying to do as it appeared to have 2 people standing and jumping on the hood and if it wasn't for the presence of a police officer looking on I would have thought it was road rage vandalism.

Eventually, the lanes started creeping forwards as they police had shut off the freeway before the accident and were bottlenecking everyone off that last exit ramp. When we made it to the very front of the bottleneck we could clearly see that the accident involved a single 18 wheeler which had gone out of his main lane and slammed into an HOV exit barrier with the damage causing the truck to catch fire and become completely engulfed in flames. It was a completely smoldering ruin by the time we made it up to the detour.

However, the excitement wasn't even done. There was a white Cadillac in the lane next to us waiting their turn to go on the exit ramp which suddenly started to emit white smoke from under the hood, as well as some awful grinding noise from the engine. There was an elderly couple driving who were both terrified and confused and had no idea what to do. The car started smoking even more and then developed an oil drip which was catching fire. At this point, another driver got out of his car, ran up, and yelled for them to get the car over to the closed off part of the freeway and get out of it. They managed to get the car over to where no other cars were and get out of it safely. About a minute later, the oil drip which was catching fire caused the entire car to suddenly become engulfed in flames. This caused the exit ramp to come to a halt for fear of a suddenly exploding car. One of the firetrucks at the main accident site finally came back and started to put the new fire out right in front of us. We were so close I felt almost certain the news helicopters overhead had shots of us on the nightly news as well. They eventually put the Cadillac out, and about that time the exit ramped cleared and we were finally able to make it off the freeway.

I-10 stayed closed until late that evening for the cleanup to be finished. We finally made it to the mall, Kristi got her haircut, which I think turned out really cute, and we had a great dinner that night with Susie and Paul at Buca di Beppo. The food was really great, and the girls probably had a little too much vino to drink, but it was all great fun, and a much better close to the day that what it had started out as.