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Hundreds of motorists waited desperately for help Tuesday after being stranded for nearly 24 hours in freezing temperatures along a 50-mile stretch of highway south of the nation's capital that became impassable when tractor-trailers jackknifed in a winter storm.
Virginia department of transportation saying, i-95 drivers, state and local coming asap with supplies and to move you. so how long did it take after vdot sent that message to see anyone who could actually help you? >> it was about four hours later and the prince william county fire rescue department that came up from behind and was literally pulling cars backwards down the wrong way on the interstate to an exit and getting us off that way. they ended up turning my car around so i ended up driving northbound in the southbound lanes to get to an exit. once you got off i-95 they forced you back o...
Opposite direction of the direction we want to go. >> how long have you been dating the young lady? >> we've been together about 3 years. >> and you've been stuck in a car for 17 hours. this could have gone either way. >> we're still here. i'm able to talk to you on the phone so that's pretty promising, i think. >> what have officials told you about getting back to maine? >> good question. the only thing i've been able to get is either through twitter or the vdot website. everything we're getting is no timeline. nobody knows exactly when northbound traffic is going to resume. all we can do is ...
He said at a certain point it went from being the worst commute of his life, the worst transportation experience of his life to literally a survival experience where he was just trying to stay warm enough, conserve enough energy, stay alive. how scared were you? >> the thing that scared me more than anything was whether or not i was going to run out of gas because then i was going to get stuck. and i didn't want to ever get out of my car because the road was a sheet of ice. my fear was that if i got out of the car and if i saw some people did it and they were slipping and sliding. but if they ...
>> now 27 hours into my journey. i once did this by bicycle. and it took me 13 hours. so it's going to take me 27 or 28 by car. there's a lesson in there somewhere. >> reporter: state officials are apologizing to drivers but insist that crews could not have possibly kept up with the quick clip of the snowfall. crews decided not to pretreat the interstate, underscoring the storm started as rain, which would have washed the solution away. >> we've been working on this through the night. we have the resources that we need, so that being vdot, virginia state police, a lot of tow trucks on the scen...