10 People, Baby Die When Van Hits Truck

A van filled with farm workers crashed head-on Sunday morning into a tractor-trailer on a fog-shrouded rural highway west of Fresno, killing 10 adults and a 1-year-old baby, authorities said.

The van was heading east about 9:45 a.m. when the driver crossed the center line of California 180 to pass another vehicle, apparently not seeing the oncoming truck, authorities said.

The truck driver told the CHP he slammed on the brakes, trying to avoid the crash. Instead, the rig jackknifed, blocking the van’s path.

Killed were eight men, two women and the baby. The truck driver was not seriously hurt.

One survivor was airlifted to University Medical Center in Fresno, where he was listed in stable condition.

“It’s pretty phenomenal that one person survived. He was seated in the very back,” CHP officer Bill Nation said. “The bodies were all still inside the van. The entire front end was crushed. It was a horrible sight.”

By late Sunday, identities of the victims had not been released, although Nation said some of those killed were related. The adults were farm workers living in the Fresno County town of Mendota.

Only three of those in the van--the driver, the front seat passenger and the baby--were belted in. “I’m not sure they would have made a difference in this accident,” Nation said. “The impact was that severe.”

The van was registered to transport farm workers to and from the fields, but it did not appear that the victims were on their way to work, Nation said. One witness told officers the workers were driving to Fresno to spend the day shopping.

“With the child in the car, it appears that they weren’t headed to work,” Nation said. “There were no pruning shears or anything like that [in the van].”

Witnesses gave varying accounts of the fog’s severity. Some said visibility was less than 200 feet. Others said it was closer to 500 feet.

Art Magallenas, who was driving a truck behind the tractor-trailer, said there was clear sunlight when it suddenly became very foggy.

“You had to put on your brakes very fast,” he said. “It was scary.”

Hours after the crash, dirt covered a 9-yard-long oil slick. Orange chalk marks were evident, including three which appeared to be outlines of bodies.

Traffic was blocked for three miles on each side of the accident but authorities reopened the highway Sunday afternoon. CHP investigators were expected back at the scene today.

The crash site is about 30 miles northeast of the site of a 1991 multiple-car crash that killed 17 people and injured scores of others. At the time that wreck, caused by a blinding dust storm, was called the nation’s worst ever.

The Central Valley is plagued with tule fog during the winter. The fog gets its name because it typically forms around the tule marshes, creeping out across fields and roads. Sometimes if lifts for only a few hours during the day before it sets back in, shrouding the nights and early mornings.

Mendota, on Fresno County’s west side and about 160 miles southeast of San Francisco, is surrounded by vegetable and melon fields. Its population doubles to about 15,000 each spring with the arrival of seasonal farm workers from Mexico and Central America.

The migrants who tend to the 250 crops of the San Joaquin Valley, the nation’s richest farm belt, follow the same rhythm year to year: harvest in summer, pruning in fall and a return across the border in November.

All too often, however, the migration of the farm workers in Fresno and other California counties is accompanied by deadly accidents involving crowded vans or trucks.

Eleven people, many of them Mexican immigrants, died about eight weeks ago in a fiery crash on California 1 near rural Lompoc in Santa Barbara County. Accident investigators said a Ford pickup truck slammed into a Chevrolet van, leaving eight of the 12 people in the van dead. All three people in the pickup died. Investigators said several victims of that accident had spent the day selling corn.

In June, five Mexican immigrants were killed and three others were injured when a tractor-trailer slammed into the rear of a van laden with mangoes and strawberries on Interstate 5 near Buttonwillow, a town south of Fresno.

In July 1996, five people were killed and 10 injured in a predawn accident on California 33 near Mendota when a van collided head-on with a car and exploded.

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The Associated Press contributed to this story.