Emergency personnel work at the accident site as smoke rises from the wreckage after about 18 vehicles slammed together on a rain-drenched Alabama highway during Tropical Storm Claudette
CAMP HILL (Alabama, US), June 22 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Claudette regained tropical storm status and headed out to sea from the North Carolina coast on Monday, less than two days after the system killed 14 people in Alabama, including eight children who died in a highway crash.
The children who died Saturday were in a van for a home for abused or neglected children when it erupted in flames in the wreck along a wet Interstate 65 about 55 kilometres south of Montgomery. Butler County Coroner Wayne Garlock said multiple vehicles probably hydroplaned.
The crash also claimed the lives of two people in another vehicle – a 29-year-old Tennessee man and his 9-month-old daughter. Other people were injured.
Elsewhere, a 24-year-old man and a 3-year-old boy were killed on Saturday when a tree fell on their house just outside Tuscaloosa, and a 23-year-old Fort Payne woman died after her car ran off the road into a swollen creek, authorities said.
News outlets reported that search dogs located the body of a man believed to have fallen into the water during flash flooding in Birmingham.
By Monday morning, Claudette had maximum sustained winds of 65kmh. The storm was about 145km south of Ocean City, Maryland, and moving east-northeast at 45kmh, the National Hurricane Center said.
The system was expected to pass near or south of Nova Scotia before dissipating late Tuesday.
About 3 to 5 centimetres of rain was expected in the Carolinas before Claudette moved out to sea.
The van in Saturday’s crash was carrying children ages 4 to 17 who were being cared for at the Tallapoosa County Girls Ranch, a youth home operated by the Alabama Sheriffs Association that takes in abused and neglected children, including foster children.
The van was heading back to the ranch near Camp Hill, northeast of Montgomery, after a week at the beach in Gulf Shores. Ranch Director Candice Gulley was the van’s only survivor – pulled from the flames by a bystander.
“Words cannot explain what I saw,” Michael Smith, the youth ranch’s CEO, said of the accident site, which he visited Saturday. He returned from Gulf Shores in a separate van and did not see the crash when it happened.
Gulley remained hospitalised on Sunday in Montgomery in serious but stable condition. Two of the dead in the van were her children, ages 4 and 16. Four others were ranch residents and two were guests, Smith said.
The annual trip to the beach is the highlight of the year at the ranch. It’s a new experience for many of the girls, a worker said. Writing on social media ahead of the trip, the employee said the organisation wanted “our girls to be able to enjoy all of the things that regular families get to do on vacation” and later posted a photo of girls standing on the beach under a blue sky looking out at the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
Volunteers delivered food on Monday at the ranch, on a section of a two-lane county highway lined with wooden fences painted white. Sheriff’s cars and orange traffic barrels blocked the road leading to the area where girls live in homes with their house parents.
The coroner said the location of the wreck is “notorious” for hydroplaning, as the northbound highway curves down a hill to a small creek. Traffic on that stretch of I-65 is usually filled with vacationers driving to and from Gulf of Mexico beaches on summer weekends. — NNN-AGENCIES
