A heavy-duty pickup towing a load of lumber crashed and caught fire this morning on westbound I-70, sending one man to the hospital and closing the interstate for nearly four-and-a-half hours.
Summit Fire and EMS confirms a one-ton dually pickup with a gooseneck trailer was leaving the Eisenhower-Johnson Tunnels around 6:50 a.m. when it smashed into a pair of semi-trucks. It came to rest on a guardrail, where the pickup and its lumber caught fire.
“The battalion chief could see smoke billowing off the scene from way down in town,” Summit Fire’s Steve Lipsher tells Krystal 93. “He immediately ordered a third engine and water tender truck to come and supplement our efforts up there.”
Firefighters quickly doused the flaming pickup and its load.
The driver of the pickup was “the priority,” Lipsher says. The unidentified man was briefly treated on scene and then rushed to St. Anthony’s Summit Hospital with unspecified injuries.
The fire was contained and no one else was injured. The cause of the runaway pickup is under investigation by Colorado State Patrol.
Vehicle fires on I-70 are so common that Summit Fire has a protocol designed just to fight them, Lipsher says. What is unusual right now is the extreme fire danger surrounding the interstate. For the first time in four years, Summit and neighboring counties are living with a Stage 2 fire ban.
“Early on there was concern about the possibility of fire spreading,” Lipsher says. “We did immediately protect that aspect of the scene with water to keep it from spreading into the adjacent hillside.”
Westbound I-70 reopened around 11:20 a.m., according to state patrol. The detour onto U.S. 6 Loveland pass was backed up for miles. That route was supposed to be closed for seasonal maintenance.
Preview image courtesy Summit Fire & EMS on Facebook.