Black Ice, Near-Death, and

Transcendence on I-91
A car trip north ends in a terrifying slide off the highway.
By John Seabrook

I placed the last of the presents on the passenger’s seat of the

truck and climbed in behind the wheel. Rose, my nine-year-old
daughter, still p.j.’d and warm from bed, was bundled up on the
right-hand side of the back seat, iPad in hand, nudging Foxy the
dog over toward the middle. Luggage I’d ordinarily put in the bed
of the pickup was inside the cab instead, because freezing rain was
forecast for New England.
My wife, Lisa, came out to help Rose with her seat belt. I
gave her a quick, gotta-go kiss through the driver’s-side window—
she was planning to head up with our son, Harry, later that day—
and we were away on schedule. The B.Q.E. was actually moving;
the Hutch was a dream. We would have plenty of time once we got
to Vermont to find a Christmas tree in the woods for the others to
help decorate when they arrived.
“Outstanding, Private!” I said, glancing in the rearview. But
Rose, watching “Moana” with headphones on, couldn’t hear me.
Bluetoothlessly, I d.j.’d with my iPhone, which Lisa, when riding
shotgun, ordinarily prohibits for safety reasons. We waited until
after New Haven to stop for a drive-through breakfast, because
the Berlin, Connecticut, exit has a McDonald’s next to it, along
with a Mobil station where I went afterward to fill the tank. It was
raining lightly, and was noticeably colder than in Brooklyn. I was
glad to be in a four-wheel-drive truck—a Ford F-150, one of
America’s most popular vehicles—which usually stayed on the
farm in Vermont.
As I was going inside for the washroom key, Rose asked for
Skittles. I looked appalled—candy at this hour?—but bought her a
bag anyway. “Early Christmas present,” I said, tossing it over the
seat as I jumped into the truck and started off again.
At Hartford, we changed to Interstate 91. The freezing rain started
in Massachusetts, just north of Holyoke. An icy fog clung to the
sides of the highway in the swampy area around Amherst. I
recalled a haunting line of Emily Dickinson’s from some long-ago
college course: “A chilly Peace infests the Grass.” I saw a car spun
out in the median near Greenfield. New York plates. Flatlander.
The first black-ice warning was on a highway message board just
inside the Vermont border. Northerners know to fear black ice,
but its deadly nature is not widely understood by people from
more temperate regions, and figurative language doesn’t help. The
ice isn’t actually black (Key and Peele do a funny bit on the
racializing of this particularly sinister hazard); it only looks that
way on asphalt. Black ice means any thin, clear coating of ice,
without the trapped air bubbles that render thicker ice cloudy. If
you take an ice cube from the tray and look at the bottommost
layer, it will be clear. Black ice often forms at night, when the dew
point is near freezing and the cold pavement turns moisture to ice.
On a highway, black ice is made lethal by the addition of speed
and surprise. All at once, you lose control of both steering and
brakes, and become the passenger in a two-ton object now driven
by the physics of inertia and friction, with a front-row seat to your
own demise. For the victims, black-ice accidents resemble Alpine
falls: a silent slip, and a terrifying slide into the abyss.
 Dan Robinson began his career in weather videography by
chasing tornadoes, working out of West Virginia. As a side project,
he collected footage of crazy spins on black ice; the video is catnip
to local news. These days, ice is practically his main gig. (He also
works in I.T.) His footage, available on YouTube, looks as if it
should be set to bloopers music. Eighteen-wheelers suddenly
come down with the wiggles, like segmented caterpillar pull toys.
Robinson realized that while freezing rain is by far the deadliest
weather hazard out there, including the threat posed by
tornadoes, the way accident data are collected and classified
doesn’t reflect that fact. Federal Highway Administration data
show that from 2005 to 2014 there were, on average, 1,836 deaths
and 136,309 injuries per year due to snow and ice, three times
more than the numbers generated by any other weather hazard.
But most state police departments don’t list freezing rain as a
cause or identify the kind of ice involved, so the danger of black
ice goes unquantified.
I learned to drive in Vermont, and have encountered black
ice on secondary roads before. But that day on I-91 I had fallen
into a different kind of hazard, a “heuristic trap.” The phrase is
from a 2002 paper by Ian McCammon, who sought to explain why
avalanches are often triggered by knowledgeable backcountry
skiers who should know better. Their experience actually hurts
some skiers, the author argued, by making them overconfident
and willing to disregard ordinary safety precautions. Likewise, on
the highway, a driver from Miami coming up for the winter
holidays who has never encountered black ice before may be more
likely to slow down than a driver like me, who grew up with it.
My heuristic trap was compounded by overconfidence in the F-
150’s AdvanceTrac system, Ford’s version of the anti-lock braking
system, or A.B.S., installed on all newer cars and trucks. In my
truck, each wheel has its own sensor, as does the steering column,
and if the onboard computer detects one or two wheels spinning
faster than the others, it reduces the power to the wheels getting
traction. But if no wheels have traction, A.B.S. won’t work. Only
metal-studded winter tires will help in that situation. Traction
systems get vehicles started on slick surfaces, and help control
them at lower speeds, but they can also deceive drivers into
thinking that the road is less slippery than it really is. Only when
they try to brake do they understand the danger—at the moment
when it’s too late.
By Exit 6, Rockingham, traffic was down to one lane. A
Vermont Agency of Transportation (VTrans) snowplow, with
flashing orange lights, was spraying brine on the road. After Exit
7, Springfield, the highway climbed a long, snowy hill for a couple
of miles. Snow mixed with the freezing rain in the higher
elevation. At the top of the ridge was a tea-colored cliff, made by a
road cut.
Ahead, a long line of cars was stuck behind a white truck
doing fifty. No one wanted to pass, because the left lane hadn’t
been brined (and because fifty was really fast enough). After some
minutes, I was fed up. I’ve got a truck, bro. So I pulled out to pass.
It took longer to get by the cars than I thought it would, and as I
drew level with the truck—a propane truck, it looked like,
although its icy spray was striking my windshield hard—I was
going downhill. I pressed the accelerator to get past it, steered
gently right, and took my foot off the gas—my worst mistake,
other than passing in the first place. The weight transfer from
deceleration lightened the F-150’s rear, and pickups are already
front-heavy, relative to cars.
I felt my back end start to yaw—rotate clockwise, turning us
south. It was too slippery, and my speed was too great, for
AdvanceTrac to help. I tried to turn the wheel into the skid—
“Look where you want the car to go”—but I felt only the terrible
looseness in the steering column that indicated no control.
Our rear end continued its lazy rotation until, still under a
second into the event, on the right side of the windshield, glowing
in the clear ice forming on the glass, I saw the propane truck’s
headlights, shining toward us.
“Oh, Rose, we’re sliding!” I called out, sounding apologetic,
because it appeared that I’d killed us. Still absorbed in the movie,
however, Rose didn’t hear me or notice the oncoming headlights,
or realize the danger we were in, because everything was
occurring in silence, on ice.
Ernie Patnoe, forty-eight, started out as a mechanic in
Vermont Transportation’s Middlesex garage, in one of VTrans’s
eight maintenance districts, where he fixed and prepped plows.
After eight years of that, Patnoe got his own plow route, and
worked his way up to garage supervisor, then to general manager,
and now he is the over-all administrator for VTrans’s
maintenance staff—five hundred workers—and two hundred and
fifty plows, in sixty-five facilities across the state.
Patnoe is based in VTrans’s new transportation-management
center, outside Montpelier. The staff has access to data sent from
a network of road sensors. Those embedded in the road surface
record pavement and subsurface temperatures; infrared “grip
sensors” are beamed onto the road surface from nearby poles.
Algorithms crunch the data the sensors produce to make
predictions that the operators in the management center can use
to send alerts to any message board in the state, like the one I saw.
But with black ice, Patnoe said, “once the grip sensors tell us it’s
slippery, it’s usually too late.” The ice is already weaponized.
 The weather I was driving through makes black ice relatively
easy to predict. However, “say it’s about ten degrees, a beautiful
day,” Patnoe said, “and the sun is out. And the road surface is
frozen. So the sun will pull that moisture out, and next thing you
know you have black ice, especially on a high-speed road.” The
friction from the tires of the eighteen-wheelers melts the ice; a
spindrift of snow blows over the road and liquefies; the water
spreads and freezes. “It’s really hard to put a science behind it,
and I’m no scientist, but you just do not know where the sun is
going to pull that frost,” Patnoe said. “We have some known
trouble spots. But let’s just say, out of the blue, a whole road
freezes up—pulls frost for miles. Then we need to be reactive.”
That’s too late for the driver who gets there before the salt truck.
Mine was garden-variety black ice. It formed the same way that
the clear ice on my windshield formed. Even at higher elevations,
where raindrops could be five degrees below freezing, they don’t
crystallize into sleet or snow, which would be less slippery;
instead, they remain in a liquid, “supercooled” state, until they
“nucleate”—become ice—on striking anything hard, such as the
road surface or a car.