The tanker truck behind them kept coming and Lorraine Gauthier kept screaming, “Don’t hit us, don’t hit us!”

The truck hit and Gauthier’s car spun, and though the car came to a stop, the fear did not. Everywhere vehicles were hitting each other.

“You could hear it, them all banging. You don’t know whether to get out and run or just stay in the vehicle and wait.”

As the truck in front of her started jackknifing and she slowed down, Marcie Vandenboom knew trouble was coming.

“I could feel the tension behind me. The truck came from behind on my left, very fast and pushed us, pushed us, pushed us . . . I was scared. I didn’t know if we were going to make it because it was just jumble, loud noises around us.”

One truck pushed Cheryl White and her van full of kids underneath the tail end of another transport. She stopped in enough time that only a small part of her van’s hood was crushed. Then she waited.

“I was praying that the transport trucks behind me weren’t going to crush my vehicle,” she said. “We’re very lucky, happy to be alive.”

Dozens and dozens of other people had similar tales of sudden terror and for many, great relief as about 50 vehicles piled into each other when whiteouts hit a section of the eastbound lanes of Hwy. 401 near Woodstock just before noon Friday.

“The good part is no serious injuries were reported,” Western Region OPP Sgt. Dave Rektor said.

But the pileup forced OPP to close all eastbound lanes at Foldens Line until Friday evening, causing a 10-kilometre backup for thousands of drivers on one of Canada’s busiest highways.

“We had winter weather conditions, people not adjusting their speed appropriately and we ended up with a 50-car collision involving a mix of transports,” Rektor said. “It’s another example of people not adjusting to winter weather conditions.”

But many drivers involved said the weather turned from tolerable to horrible in an instant.

“It all of a sudden just went from almost clear to complete whiteout,” said Cambridge resident Richard Johnstone, stuck in his car after pulling a trailer after a camping trip in Florida.

“It was a big whiteout and I just managed to stop. A couple of guys behind didn’t manage so somebody rear ended the trailer but the damage is minor.”

For many, the first signs of trouble were the sight of brake lights on transport trucks or vehicles sliding off the road ahead.

“All of a sudden you couldn’t see anything. All of a sudden the transport trucks just smashed right beside us,” said Kelsey Deland, heading to Kingston with Nicole Gignac to work for a travel agency.

“Just get out of the way,” she kept thinking as driver Gignac managed to move the car to the side of the highway and stop, without getting hit.

“It was pretty scary. We couldn’t even see ahead of us,” Gignac said.

When they finally get to Kingston and start their job, “We’re going to tell people to go south,” Deland said.

Though some drivers chose to remain in their vehicles during the cleanup, others picked their way through the puzzle of wrecks, bits of metal and snow to a bus taking the stranded to a Woodstock rest stop.

The pileup forced a change in plans for many.

Bright’s Grove residents White and Vandenboom were heading in their two vehicles with their sons to a hockey tournament in Richmond Hill.

They found refuge in the warm cab of a friendly London trucker, but Vandenboom was still shaking an hour after the crash.

She figured there was no way they were going to make that afternoon’s game, and maybe none of the weekend’s games.

“I’m not making tomorrow’s 8 a.m game or the next one because I’m going home,” Vandenboom said.

Several metres down the highway, Gauthier waited out the cleanup in her car, still facing against the traffic, if there was any, and wondering how she was going to get to Toronto from Windsor.

“We’re halfway there and now we’re going the wrong way.”

randy.richmond@sunmedia.ca