Although by its own figures California has long since overtaken New York to become the most populous state in the Union. Governor Pat Brown picked last week to celebrate the great occasion. The Chamber of Commerce Managers Association brightly suggested that each of the state’s 9,000,000 motorcar owners honk their horns in unison on Dec. 28. But, as it happened. H-day came at minus7 in perhaps the most spectacular, horn-honking, steel-crunching traffic pileup in vehicular history.
The Santa Ana Freeway, on which cars whoosh past such Southern California institutions as Disneyland and San Juan Capistrano on the way from Los Angeles to San Diego, was blotched by fog. As state cops later reconstructed it, a woman driver pulled part way off the freeway with a flat tire—setting off a chain reaction that piled car upon car for five miles. The toll: one dead (a nun riding in a car about a mile back from the first crash), two critically injured. 24 in the hospital, 25 others slightly injured. 20 cars demolished. 40 cars disabled and at least 200 cars involved.
Off-duty Deputy Sheriff Robert Bollong, who was driving one of the first cars, recalls. “I slammed on my brakes and was hit from behind. My car started to spin and was hit on the right front fender. That spun it back a ways, and it was hit a third time, on the left front fender. It was bouncing around like a rubber ball.” The accident-report diagram, said a state highway patrol lieutenant, looked “like somebody took a bunch of dominoes and just threw them down. The cars are pointed every which way. and at least a third of them are pointed back where they came from.”
In California, as in the 49 smaller states, a driver who crashes into another car from behind bears the burden of proving he was not driving too fast or too close—making 199 drivers potentially at fault for the Santa Ana smashup. And whatever happened to that front-running woman who had started it all? She apparently repaired her flat tire and left during the confusion.
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