At least six people have been killed and dozens of other people have been injured following major car crashes caused by a dust storm in southern Illinois, state police said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The multi-vehicle pile-up took place on the I-55 road south of Springfield in central Illinois, police said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The coroner’s office confirmed that at least six were killed in the incident. More than 30 people were injured and taken to hospital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The crash involved 40-60 cars and multiple lorries with trailers, and occurred just after 11am CT (4pm GMT), according to Major Starrick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“The cause of the crashes is due to excessive winds blowing dirt from farm fields across the motorway, leading to zero visibility,” he said during a press conference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He said the I-55 would be closed in both directions until late morning or early afternoon on Tuesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
An earlier police statement encouraged people traveling in the area to “seek alternate routes”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At least six people have been killed and dozens of other people have been injured following major car crashes caused by a dust storm in southern Illinois, state police said. The multi-vehicle pile-up took place on the I-55 road south of Springfield in central Illinois, police said. The coroner’s office confirmed that at least six […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6562,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[220],"tags":[2444,2443,2445,193,1276],"class_list":["post-6561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-car-crashes","tag-dust-storm","tag-illinois","tag-news","tag-us"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6561"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6561\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6563,"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6561\/revisions\/6563"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}