WEST BRANCH, Iowa (KCRG) – Cleanup crews are still working to remove vehicles from Interstate 80 in eastern Iowa following multiple crashes that blocked the highway for about 12 hours Saturday morning.

Multiple crashes on I-80 east of Iowa City Saturday morning shut down the interstate for several hours in both directions. No one was killed, but dozens of people were injured and taken to the hospital.

Lanes in the area will be closed in order to pull crashed cars out of the median.

“Towing and recovering efforts started right away after the storm, Sunday night after the storm and have continued each night since then and we’re estimating a couple, two to three more nights yet to get everything removed out there,” said Mitch Wood with the Iowa Department of Transportation.

DOT explains highway closure decision

The DOT did not expect conditions to be as bad as they were this weekend. Access to the highway was only limited after the crash happened.

“It started out with just a typical Iowa snowfall forecast. Nothing in that forecast, I guess, rose to that level of alarm for us to kind of forecast that we would have seen the traffic issues that we ended up seeing,” Wood said.

The DOT says preemptively closing the interstate can be done if unsafe travel can be predicted.

“What we could never really anticipate is the driving conditions changing rapidly and how drivers are going to respond to that,” Wood said.

Wood says shutting down an interstate is never a light decision.

“It’s not something that we necessarily want to do but when we make that decision, almost everytime we’re making that decision for safety reasons,” Wood said.

Cleanup of those accidents from Saturday are still underway. That typically happens in the evening, so drivers should watch for signs and lane closures when towing is happening.

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