National Transportation Safety Board to investigate fiery Wyoming crash

Crews worked all night attempting to clear wreckage from one of the Green River Tunnels, the site of a fiery crash on Friday.

Crews worked all night attempting to clear wreckage from one of the Green River Tunnels, the site of a fiery crash on Friday. (Wyoming Department of Transportation)


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KEY TAKEAWAYS
  • The NTSB has launched a safety investigation into a deadly Wyoming crash.
  • The crash involved multiple vehicles in the Green River Tunnels on I-80.

GREEN RIVER, Wyo. — The National Transportation Safety Board has opened a safety investigation into the fiery crash on Friday that killed two people and left an unknown number of injured at the Green River Tunnels in Wyoming, as traffic on Interstate 80 continues to be diverted around the area.

The NTSB Saturday post on X also says the investigation into the crash will be in coordination with the Wyoming Highway Patrol.

The incident on Friday afternoon involved "multiple passenger and commercial vehicles in the middle and western parts of the westbound tunnel located at mile marker 90.2 on I-80," according to a press release sent Saturday by the Wyoming Department of Transportation.

On Friday, the Memorial Hospital of Sweetwater County asked the public to refrain from visiting the hospital except for an emergency due to the "mass-casualty incident" in the tunnels, but no information has been released on the number of injured.

Wyoming Highway Patrol and local wrecker companies were still clearing damaged and abandoned vehicles out of the tunnel after fires blazed within as of Saturday morning.

"First responders bravely worked through the night to fight the fire in the tunnel, and we could not be more appreciative of their teamwork and support," Wyoming Highway Patrol Lt. Col. Karl Germain said in the release.

Electrical equipment and lighting fell from the ceiling during the fire, and a thick layer of soot will need to be cleaned off the tunnel. Engineers from the Wyoming Department of Transportation "are confident in the structural integrity of the eastbound tunnel and its ability to carry traffic again once the westbound crash scene is cleared," the release says.

Westbound traffic continues to be rerouted at mile marker 91 and eastbound at mile marker 89 through the city of Green River, which is causing delays.

Contributing: Alex Tumalip

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The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.

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Collin Leonard is a reporter for KSL.com. He covers federal and state courts, northern Utah communities and military news. Collin is a graduate of Duke University.

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