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Deputies Describe Chaos Of I-4 Fog Disaster

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By KEITH MORELLI, The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 15, 2008

Updated: 01/15/2008 12:12 am

BARTOW - Polk County sheriff's Deputy Paul Buoniconti didn't think the man could survive. Amid the fiery Interstate 4 pileup, the victim's car was pinned beneath a tractor-trailer, which in turn was wedged between two other vehicles.

"I couldn't see him," Buoniconti recalled at Monday's news conference. "I could only hear him. He was coherent."

The deputy heard a cell phone ring inside the wreckage. The man said his wife was trying to call, but he couldn't move his arms.

"I called his wife back for him," Buoniconti said, using his own cell phone and mindful of similar scenes that played out with severely wounded service people in Iraq, where he served as a Marine. He wanted to give the two a chance to talk - perhaps for the last time.

Buoniconti put the speaker on and held the phone down as close as he could to the wreck. The wife and husband talked. "He said, 'I love you,' and she said, 'I love you.'"

Emergency crews worked for five hours to free the man from the wreckage. He likely will recover, Buoniconti said. His name was not released.

The deputy hasn't talked to the victim or his wife since, although he said he tried to call her Monday morning.

Buoniconti and Deputy Carlton Turner, one of the first responders on the scene, told their stories at the news conference as details emerged of the chaos inside the blinding fog and smoke. Four people died in the 70-vehicle pileup Wednesday morning, and 38 were injured.

Turner arrived thinking he would close off a lane of I-4 to divert traffic from a single accident. Instead, he worked to survive collision after collision - and helped organize the injured so they could survive, too.

Turner came upon the first wreck right after entering the thick fog blamed in the pileup. He angled his car to keep other vehicles from hitting the wrecked car. As he tried to get out, his patrol car was hit, throwing him back inside and spinning it around.

"And then, something else hit me again," Turner said. To his right, he saw a tractor trailer on fire.

He managed to get his car off the road and used it as a bunker for injured drivers. "There was gas and oil all over the road," he said.

Then the thought hit him: "I'm going to need all the help I can get."

He couldn't see anything, but he heard vehicle after vehicle slamming into one other. People screamed for help. Wrecks he heard but couldn't see showered him with debris and shattered glass.

"A lot of people were disoriented," Turner said. "They were looking for family members. Some didn't know their names."

He teamed up injured people, he said, placing incoherent people with people who knew what was going on. He told them to find his car and stay by it. That may have saved lives, enabling him to keep searching for injured people still in their vehicles.

"There were a lot of people screaming," Turner said. "A lot of people wanting help. I assisted as many as I could. I kept using the lines in the road to figure out where I was going and where I had been.

"I was trying to get to whoever yelled for help the loudest."

All the while, he heard vehicles crashing.

"I heard some hit their brakes, and some that didn't."

He recalled one man whom he couldn't help.

"It's a tough feeling," he said, "I can't describe it. It's a feeling like there is nothing I could do."

Reporter Keith Morelli can be reached at (813) 259-7760 or kmorelli@tampatrib.com.

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