Death in a fiery crash
3 die in Interstate 40 accident, traffic tangled for hours

Copyright © 2008
Gallup Independent
By Phil Stake
Staff writer

GALLUP — Multiple crashes on Interstate Highway 40 in Arizona congested traffic around Gallup Saturday. The first crash involved one car and took place at about 2:55 a.m.

PDT, according to Arizona DPS Officer Robert Bailey. The car careened off the right shoulder and rolled over while heading east near mile marker 344.5. The force of the crash thrust a body through the windshield and left it lying on the right side of the roadway.

Arizona State Police determined that a possible crime had taken place, which may have contributed to the crash; but because the passengers were all Navajo tribal members, and because the accident took place on tribal land, the investigation was given to Navajo Police Department, Bailey said. Navajo Police have not released the names or the total number of passengers who were inside the car.

After the crash, Arizona State Police officers narrowed the roadway in order to clear debris. The roadway reopened at 8 a.m.

About 20 minutes later, just a few hundred feet away from the original crash, a tractor-trailer rear ended a second tractor-trailer, which then collided with a third tractor-trailer. The first tractor-trailer burst into flames, Bailey said. The driver and co-driver of the first tractor-trailer, the one that caused the chain reaction, Abdi M. Yusef, 45, and Muhayadin M. Sulub, 25, both of Columbus, Ohio, died on impact. The other drivers escaped unharmed.

On Monday, Bailey remained uncertain of the contents aboard each of the trucks.

Soon traffic backed up four miles, prompting authorities to reroute traffic away from that stretch of Interstate 40 at around 10 a.m. PDT. The detour sent eastbound traffic from the 333 mile marker to northbound U.S. 191, then east on Arizona Route 264, which then turns into U.S. 491 south near Window Rock, and eventually leads to the I-40 on-ramp in Gallup. The increased traffic caused congestion and delays north of Gallup.

KGAK radio’s Pat Jarvison and Eugene Plummer had a scheduled Live Remote session in Holbrook, Ariz. Consequently they were caught in the tumult coming and going.

“I haven’t seen billows of smoke like that since the twin towers,” Jarvison said Monday. “It was pretty scary ... a trailer turned over and engulfed, hoses going, debris all over and another tractor-trailer ripped in half, its contents scattered across the highway. One of them had to be a fuel tanker.”

She said the smoke plume was visible from about five miles.

Jarvison and Plummer encountered trucks overheating during the bumper-to-bumper wait. Jarvison said one such instance forced yet another detour route through Ganado.
“On the detour route, another truck had broken down,” she said. “Traffic came to a halt.”

Eventually she was forced to travel north to Chinle, then east to get onto U.S. 191. And the 90-mile trip from Holbrook claimed a grand total of 5 1/2 hours, she said.