COTTONWOOD HEIGHTS — One person was killed and another seriously injured in a violent head-on collision that sparked a grass fire and snarled freeway traffic for much of Wednesday.
A passenger vehicle traveling the wrong way in the westbound lanes of I-215 collided head-on with a semitrailer at Knudsen's Corner near 2800 East and 6200 South around 9:45 a.m. The driver of the passenger vehicle, Donald Swensen, 71, of Sandy, was declared dead at the scene.
The truck driver was transported to a nearby hospital with chest injuries, said Unified Fire Authority Battalion Chief Clint Smith. Some of his injuries reportedly included a punctured lung.
Investigators believe the driver got on the freeway at the 2000 East offramp and traveled three quarters of a mile before crashing.
Witnesses told police the man had appeared confused before the accident and was driving about 10 mph.
Utah Highway Patrol Lt. Robert Anderson did not believe impairment was an issue, nor that the accident was a suicide.
The crash occurred at the bend where southbound traffic begins heading west. The driver of the semitrailer had "very limited sight. He had no time to react," Anderson said.
The collision caused the trailer to jackknife and ruptured one of the rig's large fuel tanks. The tanks can carry up to 200 gallons of fuel, and this one had a lot of fuel in it, Smith said.
Some of the other motorists on the freeway who witnessed the accident stopped to help the truck driver get out of his vehicle.
"This flaming gas trail is coming towards the diesel truck that's all covered in diesel everywhere," Theodore Killenger told KSL. "So we hurried, and we were just trying to make sure the semi driver was OK, and we were just like, 'We need to get him out of the car now!' We grabbed him and pulled him out, got him back away, then everything burst into flames on the semi."
Killenger said the truck driver was in shock.
"He didn't know what was going on. He couldn't even talk," he said. "We moved him over. Head to toe, (he was) covered in dirt and dust, all his clothes and face. You could just see his white little eyes wide open from shock.
"If we hadn't been there, the truck driver could have burned up," Killenger said. "Definitely, to save somebody's life, to put a little risk of my own, it's no big deal. It's what anybody would do."
Debris from the crash was strewn more than a quarter-mile from the point of impact to where the semitrailer eventually came to rest. The truck was hauling meat.
Sparks from the crash ignited the fuel, creating a massive fireball around the vehicles that rapidly spread up a hillside. The flames came within feet of a home and melted a front quarter panel of a vehicle parked on the hill.
"I heard screeching and a big, loud crash," said McCade Miller, who lives in one of the houses on the hill. "There was a big, huge trail of gas on the freeway, and it caught the hill on fire."
The first thought that went through Miller's head was, "Stop the flames, stop the flames!" he said. Miller and his neighbors grabbed hoses and buckets to try and keep the fire in check until professionals arrived.
"I didn't think I would wake up this morning and play firefighter," he said. "It was pretty exciting on the one hand and unfortunate and sad on the other."
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