Boulder crushes sedan, then hits rail car full of West Virginia University students
Two West Virginia University students were among three hospitalized Monday after a huge boulder tumbled onto a highway, hitting a vehicle and a rail car full of students, according to West Virginia officials.
Three people were hospitalized, one of them with “severe injuries,” Morgantown police said in a Wednesday Facebook post.
The driver of the car, 65-year-old Susan Cramer, underwent surgery for “several broken bones and internal injuries,” according to the Metro News.
Photos shared by the department showed two heavily damaged vehicles on U.S. 19, and a boulder that was almost as big as a car. It wasn’t clear if the car slammed head-on into the rock, or if the rock landed on the front of the car as it fell.
The rock slide comes at a time when the Southeast has been hit by periods of relentless rain, resulting in flooding and multiple rock slides, including one overnight on U.S. 441 outside Gatlinburg, Tennessee.
Another round of heavy rain is expected this week, according to the National Weather Service.
Fearing more rocks could fall, the police closed the highway overnight, according to the department’s Facebook post.
“The boulder was large enough to cause significant damage to the vehicle. It then broke into several pieces and continued across the boulevard,” Morgantown Fire Chief Mark Caravasos told the Metro News. “Pieces of it went through the fence and impacted a PRT car on the track.”
The PRT, or driverless Personal Rapid Transit, connects the university’s campuses in the city.
Morgantown Police Chief Ed Preston said the hillside has a history of becoming “destablized” after periods or rain and snow, sending rocks onto the highway, WAJR reported.
“We’re really lucky, that’s part of the reason it is closed, these (are) very substantial boulders, the size of cars coming off that hillside,” Preston told the station.
Nine students were in the PRT when it was hit, between 8th Street and Evansdale Drive, according to a West Virginia University press release.
The transit system reported the damage was severe enough that rescuers “needed to remove a large portion of the vehicle” to get the students out.
Police reopened the highway overnight Tuesday.
This story was originally published February 11, 2020 at 5:52 AM with the headline "Boulder crushes sedan, then hits rail car full of West Virginia University students."