Unprecedented traffic marks end of eclipse adventure

Monday's solar eclipse was a wonder and the weather was a delight, but the trip home was a nightmare for hundreds of thousands of skywatchers, including those who dealt with unprecedented regionwide traffic snarls as travelers funneled back through southern Illinois and western Kentucky.

The eclipse's totality occurred at 2 p.m. and ended by 2:05. That's when most of the visitors immediately scrambled for their cars and campers to be the first on the roads back to the south for destinations from Nashville to Atlanta to North Carolina.

By 3 p.m. interstate traffic near Paducah came to a crawl as thousands of people crossed the Ohio River. Drivers going eastbound on I-24 were traveling at speeds of 15 mph or less all afternoon.

That is, until they were stopped completely when a semi and several cars collided at the 8 mile marker in McCracken County. Both eastbound lanes were blocked until after 7 p.m.

Even before the accident, a logjam of vehicles had already formed in Metropolis. At times it took an hour to move the three miles from Fort Massac State Park to the interstate exit. The spillover immediately inundated Brookport, where a two-mile line of cars waited to cross the single lane of the Brookport Bridge. GPS apps even diverted a steady stream of cars and semis onto small county roads to try and find alternate ways to the only two local crossings into Kentucky.

The same scene was repeated into the night all along the eclipse's 12-state path as millions tried to return home simultaneously.  I-57 in Illinois, I-55 in Missouri and I-65 in Indiana were all bumper-to-bumper for travelers trying to get to Memphis, St. Louis, Chicago and Indianapolis.



Photos: KYTC cam on I-24 shows eastbound traffic; southbound traffic in Arkansas just a few hours after the passage of the total solar eclipse. The same interstate scenes were repeated all along the 12-state path of totality.  (KYTC, Arkansas Dept. of Transportation)