Of the 21 weather-related car accidents the Murrysville Police Department responded to yesterday morning, the first one was the worst.
The report of a two-car accident came in at 7:28 a.m., less than an hour after Sgt. Charles Tappe arrived at the station for his shift. The roads were dry on his five-mile drive to work, but it had started raining while he was in the station. When he left to respond to the accident, he slipped on the way to his car and fell on the ice, landing on his side.
The roads were even more treacherous as he made his way to the accident scene on Route 22 at Kistler Road.
"Twenty-two was a sheet of ice. There were cars everywhere," he said. "It was just a mess."
When he tried to accelerate, his tires spun.
"As fast as you wanted to get to a victim of a car crash and help them out, we couldn’t get to the incident as fast as we wanted to," he said.
The roads had probably been dry when Amanda Dias, 22, of Derry, started driving yesterday morning, Sgt. Tappe said. But as she drove west on Route 22, rain turned into ice on the roadway.
Police said Ms. Dias lost control of the car and it spun around, coming to a stop in the roadway. Ian Bonn, 24, of Latrobe, tried to avoid her vehicle, but his sport-utility vehicle, also traveling west, struck the passenger side of her Honda.
A nurse who was driving by tried to help Ms. Dias, but police said she died at the scene of head injuries. Mr. Bonn was not injured.
That stretch of Route 22 was so treacherous that another accident occurred when an ambulance arriving on the scene crashed into a firetruck, Sgt. Tappe said.
"I can’t say I’ve ever seen 22 iced up like it was today," he said.
The accidents at Kistler Road were two of the 21 weather-related crashes that Murrysville officers responded to between 7:28 a.m. and 12:45 p.m. None of the other calls involved serious injuries.
"Thank God it wasn’t Monday morning," Sgt. Tappe said. "Things probably would have been a lot worse if people had been going to work."
A shift commander at Westmoreland’s emergency dispatch center said the center received more than 100 calls about traffic incidents between 7:20 a.m. and 11 a.m.
"We were very busy," the dispatcher said.
Route 22 was closed near Kistler Road for two hours as emergency crews cleared the accident involving Ms. Dias. Rain continued to fall while Sgt. Tappe investigated, but a salt truck arrived about an hour and a half after the crash and the road was reopened soon thereafter, he said.
