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Semi hits vehicles stopped in construction zone on I-76, one dead, 4 injured
By Ed Runyan
NORTH JACKSON
Video
Orrin Hill, retired Jackson Township police chief, was working in his yard Thursday morning when he heard an explosion coming from Interstate 76.
“It was just one big boom,” he said, adding: “There was just tons of black smoke coming out of there.”
Hill was first on the scene to discover a chain-reaction collision on I-76 westbound in a construction zone near the state Route 45 overpass.
Mark Schaas of New Castle, Pa., was killed in the late-morning crash, which also left four other people injured, three of them seriously, the Ohio State Highway Patrol said.
Lt. Jerad Sutton, commander of the Canfield post of the highway patrol, said one of the three tractor-trailer drivers failed to yield for traffic that was stopped in front of him because of the construction.
Robert Brock of Saratoga Springs, Utah, was traveling west in his tractor-trailer when he failed to stop and hit the rear of another tractor-trailer driven by Kevin Roberts of Fort Wayne, Ind., the patrol said.
The impact of Roberts’ tractor-trailer forced the car Schaas was driving into the back of another tractor-trailer, and Brock’s tractor-trailer caught fire.
There were two passenger vehicles involved, one of which was a van that got wedged under the trailer of a semi. A vehicle driven by Guy Garner of Paterson, N.J., struck the cab of Roberts’ truck.
Roberts and a passenger in Schaas’ car, William Lawrence, also of New Castle, were taken to St. Elizabeth Youngstown Hospital with severe injuries.
Stephen Cole of Apple Creek, Ohio, the driver of the truck Schaas was forced into, also was taken to St. Elizabeth.
Late Thursday, Lawrence and Block were in fair condition at the hospital; Roberts was in critical condition. Cole was not on the list of patients.
“A total of four people were trapped all at once in three different vehicles, so as you can imagine, that takes a lot of coordination,” Sutton said of the firefighters and others who got them out.
It’s too early to say what caused the initial driver to hit the other vehicles, Sutton said.
A tow truck was used to lift a vehicle off the trapped car in which Schaas died, Sutton said.
The fire chiefs on the scene coordinated the removal of the trapped people so they could be taken to the hospital, Sutton said.
The truck that caught fire was extinguished by Jackson Township firefighters.
Eastbound traffic was able to continue moving as the cleanup took place, but it still caused a backup in those lanes. All westbound traffic was detoured off the interstate at state Route 46 to Mahoning Avenue in Austintown, Sutton said.
Hill drove his four-wheeler to the fence along the highway and jumped over. He was the first person to get to the scene and called 911 to report the crash.
Hill is on doctor’s orders to use an oxygen tank, so he was grateful that the smoke from the fire wasn’t blowing toward him on the highway.
First he talked to a driver sitting beside the tire of his truck who appeared to be injured. The man said his back hurt. Hill talked to him briefly.
“He was more concerned about the others. He said, ‘Please take care of the other people,’” Hill said.
Then Hill went to the cab of the truck that had come off, and that driver was still in the cab. There was no way to get him out. He didn’t even see the vehicle that was trapped under the semi trailer, he said.
“There was so much on the interstate. You couldn’t tell what was what,” he said.
“I stayed around and helped one of the guys who was trapped in the cab, talked to him and tried to keep him with us until we could get the proper equipment there to get him out,” Hill said.
“It was probably one of the worst ones I’ve seen in a long, long time – just horrible,” Hill said of the crash.
Hill worked as Jackson Township’s police chief for 22 years and has seen many accidents on the interstate.