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Woman describes chaotic scene during multi-vehicle crashes on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge; 13 people injured

Ruth Hayes said she was scared driving on the bridge with all the fog and then ended up getting hit in the middle of a 43-car pile-up.

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — People are recovering following a multi-vehicle crash in Annapolis, Maryland. One Queenstown woman shares those horrifying moments while she was on the bridge and caught in the middle of one of those crashes.

Ruth Hayes said she thought it was too foggy for the bridge to be open once she started driving further in the Westbound lanes.

“I was very nervous, I said to my grandson this is very dangerous you can’t even see in front of you… and that’s why I went slow,” driver, Ruth Hayes said.

She said that’s why she kept extra space between her and other cars, but as soon as she stopped along the westbound lanes, she felt her car rock and heard a loud noise.

“I was hit and then all you could hear is all this crunching of cars because there was a pile up behind us too,” Hayes said.

She was just one of the many caught in the middle of a chain reaction crash, which the Maryland Transportation Authority preliminarily said involved 23 vehicles and then a secondary crash with 20 more cars happened. All these crashes happened 186 feet above water.

“That red car got hit and he hit the car in front of him and pushed him out and he locked in, he was right at the rail, he could’ve went over,” Hayes said. “So, yeah, God was with all of us.”

Hayes said when she and her grandson got out of their car, they then realized the magnitude of the crash.

“It was pretty bad,” grandson and witness of the crash, Landen Cahill said. “There was cars (everywhere), airbags with blood on them it got pretty graphic.”

The Maryland Transportation Authority said 13 people were transported to nearby hospitals and two have serious injuries. Hayes said because emergency crews could not drive onto the bridge they would walk up and down with gurneys to carry victims away from the scene.

“No one went off the bridge that’s good,” Cahill said. “I’m happy to be alive.”

“This is my car, this is the damage that was done on the bridge with the accident today that many cars were involved in, and we’re just lucky that we’re alive,” Hayes said.

Hayes said she has never seen the conditions on the bridge this bad and she drives back and forth over the bridge often. Meanwhile, hundreds of drivers were stuck on the interstate waiting for the bridge to reopen to get through both the East and Westbound lanes.

All lanes have since reopened, and Hayes and her grandson were able to cross the bridge to go home after waiting for 5 hours but those who were injured are still top of mind. The cause of the crash remains under investigation. The MDTA is asking anyone who witnessed the crashes to contact them at 443-454-8703.

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