Motorists describe foggy accident on Lake Pontchartrain Causeway | A Tammany

A Jefferson man climbing out the window of his wrecked vehicle described some of the chaos on the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway the morning after one of several accidents involving dozens of vehicles on the foggy bridge.

“I got knocked down,” Paul Becnel said in an interview with The Times-Picayune on Tuesday afternoon. “That’s about all I remember at the moment.”

Becnel, 67, said he was on his way to an emergency room after the accident. His thumb and neck hurt, he said.

Becnel drove north on the Causeway from his home in Old Jefferson to work on a swimming pool. Suddenly, he said, he was pinned between two cars and trapped in his own vehicle. All around him were battered and destroyed vehicles.

“There was no escape from either door,” he said. “It looks like there is chaos everywhere.”

Becnel was among many motorists trapped on the 24-mile stretch after at least six separate accidents left debris scattered on the concrete and forced officials to close the causeway. Authorities said several people were injured and transported to area hospitals, but no deaths were reported.

Tricia LaFleur of Metairie said she saw and heard the crashes on the southbound route as she drove on the northbound route to her job on the North Shore.

She said it reminded her of the fiery crash on I-55 that killed seven people in October 2023 and involved 168 vehicles. Both times, she could “hear all the car horns from smashed cars and squealing tires,” she wrote in a message on Facebook. “My heart rate was definitely high!”

John Tomlinson, assistant emergency dispatcher for St. Tammany Fire District No. 4 based in Mandeville, said he has never seen such a large accident.

“Many people got out of their cars and took video footage of the incident,” he said.

A challenge for first responders was getting safely from one end of the bridge to the other amid the pileups.

Tomlinson entered the bridge at the Mandeville toll plaza, but had to work his way to mile marker 11 near the south bank, taking advantage of the intersections and zigzags between the southbound and northbound lanes. Tomlinson said first responders immediately lined up at turnaround points to help.

With large events like this, he said, “it always depends on how we communicate with other agencies that are responding,” he said. This morning, in addition to the Mandeville Fire Department, other first responders were Acadian, Jefferson Hospital EMS and the Jefferson Parish Fire Department.

Chantel Froeba, 39, was driving southbound in the left lane near mile marker 17 to work in Metairie when she heard the first crash of the morning. Cars traveling at about 40 miles per hour suddenly came to a stop, she said.

“I almost ran into the back of the person in front of me,” Froeba said.

Luckily the left lane became free and she was able to continue to the other side.

“It’s sad to say, but you just have to keep going,” she said.

Caiden Groce, who commutes daily from Covington to his job on the South Coast, said he was driving through the fog when vehicles around him suddenly came to a stop. When the fog cleared a little later, he discovered the reason: he was five cars away from a pileup.

“I didn’t know because of the fog,” he said. “People just started hitting the brakes.”

As he sat in his new truck, he worried that cars would crash into the line of stopped vehicles, including his. He and other drivers drove their vehicles as close to the guardrails as possible to allow emergency vehicles to pass.

Eventually, authorities helped the undamaged vehicles turn around and head north in the southbound lanes, eventually exiting the bridge in Mandeville.

“I cross the bridge every day,” he said. “I never thought I’d be stuck like this.”