59 Cars Collided on Boston Highway

As the chartered bus rumbled up the snowy highway yesterday morning en route to a women's ice hockey game in Rutland, Vt., 21-year-old Katelyn Corsino dozed off while listening to country music on her iPod. But an hour into the journey, the player from the University of Massachusetts at Boston awoke abruptly as she was tossed in the air, hitting the seat in front of her.
The bus had hit a car involved in an accident in front of it, but the collision was just beginning to unfold. A tractor-trailer behind the bus jackknifed and came barreling toward it. It missed the bus but struck another car, while seven to 10 other vehicles hit the bus from seemingly every direction.
In all, 46 cars, three buses, eight lightweight trucks, and two tractor trailer trucks collided at about 8:30 a.m. on Interstate 93 in Derry, N.H., less than 10 miles north of the Massachusetts state line. Witnesses described a scene of bloodied people and mangled vehicles, with a car wedged un der the bus. Rescuers spent nearly an hour freeing a man from a pickup truck that was trapped under a tractor trailer.
Yet only he and 14 others of the more than 100 people involved were taken by ambulance to area hospitals - all with non-life threatening injuries.
Among those believed to have been caught in the pileup was a Boy Scout troop from Massachusetts.
"I was petrified," Corsino recalled yesterday afternoon in the lobby of the UMass athletic center, after she and her teammates returned to Boston in a different bus without playing their game. "You would never think you would wake up in the morning and find yourself in a 59-car pileup."
Derry fire battalion Chief David Hoffman said, "It was pretty much a miracle we didn't have more or worse injuries . . . There were cars under other large vehicles. They stopped inches short of being major injuries and possible fatalities."
The cause of the chain-reaction pileup remained under investigation by New Hampshire State Police. But witnesses said snow was piling up on the highway, reducing traffic to only one lane. A few witnesses said authorities told them a car might have spun out while trying to avoid another vehicle on the side of the road, forcing other vehicles to swerve.

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