By Jerry Blackerby
The spring of 1967 weather was strange on the east coast of central Florida. We had little or no rain. Normally, the prevailing winds are easterly from the ocean. That spring the prevailing winds were from the west.
The winds came from across the state bringing smoke from swamp fires that were burning everywhere to mix with the morning fog creating smog. The thick smog caused many accidents, resulting highways being shut down frequently.
I lived in Eau Gallie and worked at the Kennedy Space Center. We drove I-95 each morning for most of the route to work. When the smog was thick and I-95 shut down, we drove US-1, which was a much slower route.
One morning as I picked up two people for the drive to work, we only had a little patchy fog in Eau Gallie. We headed north on I-95 since the traffic report on the radio had not mentioned any I-95 shutdown.
A little north of Eau Gallie, we entered a sweeping curve to the west and then back to the north. Prior to the curve, we had only seen light, patchy fog. As we turned west, we could see a little more fog. I eased off on the accelerator.
As we turned north, the fog closed in. I moved my foot to the brake pedal. Almost immediately, I caught a glimpse of someone at the right edge of the road waving his arms wildly. I cut to the inside lane and stomped my brakes just short of the skid point.
As we came to a stop, we were even with the last car in a five-car pileup in the right-hand lane. People were standing around the cars and we could hear cars driving south across the 30-yard center median, but could not see the southbound headlights because of the smog.
We were the first car to stop without crashing into the others. One person had run south trying to get everyone stopped before the wreck site. If I had not cut to the inside lane, we would have piled into the last car in the pileup. How did I know to cut left? Only God knows. He had a hand in that maneuver.
We had stopped successfully. One person told us that no one was seriously hurt and asked us to get to a telephone and report the accident.
We could not get across the median to the southbound side so continued north. It was about six miles to the next exit. The smog was so thick that I began feeling claustrophobia, as if everything around me had closed in. I rolled the windows down to relieve the claustrophobic feeling.
I was rolling north about 15 miles per hour. I could not see the stripe on the right side of the road. I could barely see the center stripe. I asked the person sitting in the passenger seat to watch for the exit.
I asked the person in the back seat to watch out the back window. I told him, “If you see any lights coming up, yell, and I will leave the road so we do not get hit.” I was almost afraid to take my eyes off the road long enough to look in the rearview mirror.
We found the exit and exited very slowly. I knew that a service station was across the intersecting road. I followed the exit as it merged to the right with the intersecting road and never saw the service station.
I carefully made a U-turn and came back towards the Interstate. We turned in at the first driveway, which had to be the service station. Just before reaching the pump area, we could see the lights of the station. I got out and called the highway patrol. They took the accident report on the telephone and we left.
I thought we should go towards US-1. The station owner had just come from that direction and suggested that we continue on I-95 because we would not have all of the stop signs and cross streets. He said the fog was just as bad or worse on the route to US-1 because it was closer to the ocean and US-1 ran alongside the Indian River.
I hated to get back on the road, but we needed to get to work. We slowly reentered I-95 northbound. The next exit, which was the road we normally took east from I-95 to Merritt Island and the Kennedy Space Center, was about three miles north.
As we drove east at the next exit, the fog became a little lighter. We could see about a quarter mile. We crossed over US-1 and could see that both north and southbound lanes were dead stopped as far as we could see with multiple accidents. If we had gone to US-1, we would have been blocked by that mess.
By the time we turned north on Merritt Island, the fog was fairly clear. We made it to work safely. Later that day, I heard a report on the radio that the highway patrol had more than 125 accident incidents from different locations in the fog. Each accident involved multiple vehicles and many injuries. I thanked God that we had made it safely.
Copyright © Jerry Blackerby 2009