- Dozens of trucks and cars were stranded on Interstate 10 overnight.
- Snow and ice continue to make travel tricky.
- Officials in Marfa opened two gyms for stranded travelers.
Hundreds of truckers and motorists spent the night on frozen Interstate 10 in far west Texas because of a winter storm.
The Texas Department of Public Safety said Thursday morning that ice and snow continue to make travel along I-10 from Crockett County to El Paso County treacherous.
The state’s Department of Transportation said traffic headed west was moving slowly around 7 a.m.
“The crews still have to wake truck drivers to get them moving. There are kilometers of stranded sleeping drivers. We were traveling east but came to a standstill because of ice,” the department said in a Facebook post.
“I’ve been a sheriff for 20 years and I’ve never seen anything like it,” Oscar Carillo, sheriff of Culberson County, told KVIA.
(FORECAST: New Years Storm brings snow and ice to the plains, the Midwest, and the Northeast)
Carillo said the freeway reopened early Thursday in Culberson but warned that the driving conditions of the winter storm, named by The Weather Channel John, were still very dangerous.
Jackknifed tractor units and car accidents propped up traffic for miles, the Van Horn Advocate reported on its Facebook page.
One of the worst accidents left I-10 near Kent, Texas shut down for hours before evacuating around 8 p.m. local time, KVIA reported.
US Highway 67 remained closed between Marfa and Presidio, said the Department of Public Security. US Highway 90 was closed between Marfa and Van Horn. State Highway 17 was closed between Marfa and Fort Davis.
That vehicle drove off on icy US Highway 67 South and hit a fence in Marfa, Texas on Wednesday, December 30, 2020, Marfa Police Department said. The driver suffered minor injuries.
(Facebook / Marfa Police Department)
The closings have stranded dozens of families, Marfa Public Radio reported.
“It’s bad out there, we can barely see,” said Juan Astorga, who lives in Odessa and went to Mexico to spend New Year’s Eve with his children. “We made a mistake, but we’re staying here. See if it gets better tomorrow. “
Officials opened two school halls to house the stranded families.
The National Park Service said that all roads in Big Bend National Park were impassable because of the deep snow.
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