FORT WORTH, Texas — The NTSB says it has launched a probe into ice prevention methods on the Interstate 35W TEXPress lanes in Fort Worth, where six people were killed after a 133-car pileup.
"NTSB investigation will focus on snow/ice treatment procedures," the federal agency posted on its Twitter account.
The National Transportation Safety Board is an autonomous federal agency that often recommends safety actions to the U.S. Transportation Department and to Congress.
The pileup began just after 6 a.m. Feb. 11, after when what appeared to be a brief freezing rain shower left a thin layer of black ice covering the TEXPress toll lanes that run in the I-35W median. The toll lanes, which are separated from the nontoll I-35W main lanes by concrete barriers, opened in 2018 — essentially providing motorists with the option of paying their way out of congestion on the rest of the freeway.
Video shot by passers-by and shared on social media showed numerous cars, SUVs and 18-wheelers losing control as they came over a small hill on the southbound lanes of I-35W just past the 28th Street exit, then smashing into each other with sickening sounds of crunching metal and glass.
I-35W is owned and operated by the Texas Department of Transportation, which is one of the core agencies of state government. However, the agency in recent years has hired a private consortium known as North Tarrant Express Mobility Partners to build and maintain Tarrant County highways with the TEXPress toll lanes.
NTE Mobility Partners officials have said they are responsible for ice prevention and removal on the I-35W corridor, and that before the pileup they had been "spot treating" the highway for ice. However, it hasn't yet been disclosed whether deicing crews were aware that ice was building at the site of the eventual deadly pileup, or whether crews attempted to prevent that ice from forming.
Before dawn the morning of the pileup, surface temperatures were well below freezing, and weather radar at that time showed a small cloud of freezing rain moving across the I-35W corridor near the Fort Worth Stockyards.
NTE Mobility Partners is a consortium of companies and investors led by the U.S. arm of Cintra, a Spanish corporation known for operating roads, parking garages and other infrastructure globally. Cintra and its partners arranged much of the $1.4 billion in funding needed to pay for I-35W expansion in exchange for the right to collect tolls on the TEXPress lanes for 52 years, according to the consortium's contract with the state.
