VIDEO: Firefighters had walked back and forth between their trucks and the pile of cars where passengers were trapped so many times they began to instinctively know where to step, or not to step — a sunroof that wasn’t stable or a hood that was too slick. Much their icy walk was done on top of vehicles caught in the 133-car pileup near downtown Fort Worth.
“There were only a couple times I remember touching the surface of the road at all,” Fort Worth Fire Lt. Brian Call said, recalling his work in the TEXpress toll lanes of I-35W where cars had slid into each other north of downtown. “It was sort of crazy.”
In an interview with the Star-Telegram Tuesday, Call and Lt. Chris Nelson described the controlled rescue of dozens of motorists trapped in the pileup that killed six and injured more than 60 in the early morning hours of Feb. 11.