Vail Pass crash victim still unidentified

VAIL, Colo. — Authorities are still investigating the cause of a massive pileup Monday on Interstate 70 that left one person dead.

The Colorado State Patrol awaits word of the victim’s identity; a name may be released Wednesday. It may take days, though, before investigators are able to sort out the chain of events in a pileup involving an estimated 70 vehicles.

The State Patrol still does not know how many people were injured, but local authorities say between 17 and 22 people were taken to hospitals in Summit and Eagle counties. Five people remained hospitalized Tuesday.

The pileup closed I-70 in both directions after a semitrailer jackknifed near the summit of Vail Pass at about 1:30 p.m. One or two cars vehicles crashed into it, starting a chain reaction, said Trooper Ryan Sullivan of the state patrol.

Authorities spent the evening busing drivers caught in the pileup to nearby towns and clearing the dozens of tangled vehicles from the westbound lanes of the highway. The east lanes of the interstate reopened at about 8:40 p.m. Monday and the west lanes opened a little more than an hour later.

Kenny Griffin was one of the last people to make it over Vail Pass when he saw the crash.

"It was just a big pinball wreck," Griffin said.

Griffin said he saw six semitrailers— two of them jackknifed — at the front of the wreck with at least a dozen of cars jammed in-between. There appeared to be a second group of crashes farther behind, he said, with cars upside-down and pinned under one another.

West Vail Shell employee Chris Cooke was the first tow-truck driver to arrive at the crash scene; he towed more than a dozen of the cars in the pileup to a parking lot at the summit of the pass.

“It was horrid,” said Cooke, who has worked as a tow truck driver for 25 years in several large cities. “It was the worst wreck I’ve ever seen in my life.”

<i>The Associated Press contributed to this report.</i>

slynn@vaildaily.com