A massive pileup involving 67 vehicles on Friday left two people dead and 26 others injured, five of them seriously, on an expressway in Gunma Prefecture northwest of Tokyo, police said.
The pileup occurred on the outbound lane of the Kan-etsu Expressway in Minakami at around 7:30 p.m. after vehicles likely skidded on the icy surface as snow fell, according to the police. Twenty vehicles caught fire, taking more than seven hours to extinguish.
The deadly sequence began when a truck crashed into another truck that had stopped on the road after a single-vehicle accident, triggering collisions stretching over about 300 meters.
A 77-year-old woman from Tokyo, who was in the rear seat of a car driven by her family, died, while a body was found in the driver's seat of a large truck. Twenty-one people suffered minor injuries.
A section of the expressway was subsequently closed, with a row of badly damaged vehicles, some charred beyond recognition, clogging the outbound lane. The suspension is unlikely to be lifted at any point on Saturday, the operator said.
At that time, drivers had been instructed to slow to 50 kilometers per hour due to snow.
A heavy snow warning was issued for Minakami until 8:20 p.m. on Friday, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency.
A driver in his 60s said his truck hit the median after swerving to avoid a car ahead of him. He also heard explosions four times behind him.
"The ice made it difficult for me to control the steering wheel," he said. "I feared for my life."
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