Experts blame Thursday's traffic carnage on complacency and excessive speeds

Three dead and more than 200 cars written off in an unprecedented 10-minute spate of accidents

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The scenes on highways into Helsinki early on Thursday morning, when three people died and dozens were injured in a series of colossal highway pile-ups, resembled news footage from London's M25 orbital motorway or the German autobahns.
      In the space of ten minutes, at around 8 a.m. in the morning rush-hour, four main arteries into the capital were blocked by wrecked vehicles, as fine, powdery snow and freezing rain took drivers unawares. Police and rescue services, who were seriously stretched by the simultaneous occurrences, have already blamed excessive speeds for the carnage.
      The story itself was reported in yesterday's paper, but thereafter comes consideration of what went wrong to cause such a massive event, in which upwards of 200 cars were written off.
     
The road conditions were obviously a significant factor. Roads in the capital area were extremely slick as a belt of fine snow and freezing rain swept across from the west. The overcast, slightly warmer conditions meant the road surfaces were moist, and when a layer of new snow was placed on them, they became an ice rink. At the same time, visibility was seriously hampered by the falling snow.
      Nevertheless, Finland is not a country that is unfamiliar with winter driving conditions. Equally pertinent to the problem is the weather that preceded Thursday: day after day of cold clear mornings and dry road surfaces that encouraged people to believe they were driving in summer conditions.
     
"What is clear already is that the speeds being driven were too high relative to the road conditions", said Chief Superintendent Seppo Kujala of the Vantaa Police. "Apparently people were driving at motorway speeds. The result resembled the grisly mass pile-ups on the German autobahns." Kujala's remarks were echoed by rescue personnel, who commented that what they saw on Thursday morning was absolutely unprecedented in the Finnish experience.
     
Warnings had been issued the previous day of impending difficult conditions, but nobody had predicted things would get this bad. Despite the rise in temperature mentioned above, it was still too cold for salting to have been of any great value. Snowploughs were out, but at least one - which left from Hyvinkää at 7 a.m. - arrived minutes too late and found itself at the back of a queue of cars on the main Hämeenlinna motorway, a kilometre from the pile of wreckage littering the southbound carriageway.
     
In several cases, being in the line behind an accident gave little protection; on each of the Lahti, Porvoo, and Hämeenlinna motorways there were two separate crashes of similar scale around a kilometre apart from one another, as drivers ploughed into stationary traffic. Two of the three fatalities took place under these circumstances. One woman was run over after stepping out of her car when she had been rammed from behind. Listed among the dead was Mikko Talvitie, the Director General of the Finnish Civil Aviation Administration.
      The death toll could have been appreciably higher, but initial reports suggest that a great many of the vehicles involved were new and large, and that air-bags were deployed, saving lives.
     
By the same token, a representative from Liikenneturva, Finland's specialist agency on road safety, noted on Thursday that it may have been that many drivers had placed too much blind faith in such modern in-car innovations as ABS anti-lock brakes, vehicle stability systems, and other devices designed to improve the sense of security behind the wheel.
      The implication is that drivers believed themselves above the laws of nature. Heikki Anteroinen, a Liikenneturva training officer, was at a loss to explain why bad road conditions could come as such a surprise to so many.
      "It should be possible to notice that the road is icy and snow-covered, and that super-cooled freezing rain is coming down. For those driving on non-studded winter tyres, conditions yesterday were really bad."


Previously in HS International Edition:
  At least three dead as pile-ups cause morning traffic havoc on roads into Helsinki (17.3.2005)

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