6 dead after Missouri Highway pile-up: report

Six people were killed in a pile-up involving more than 100 vehicles on a Missouri freeway Thursday morning, authorities said.

The fatal chain reaction accident on Interstate 57 near Charleston happened after a driver applied the brakes due to fog in the area. Officials told KFVS.

First responders from Missouri, Illinois, and Kentucky rushed to the scene of the “mass motor vehicle accident” involving “over 135 vehicles,” the Scott City Fire Department wrote on Facebook.

“When we got the call around 8 a.m. and as we approached the interstate, it was a very thick fog,” said Robert Hearnes, director of the Charleston Department of Public Safety.

“They couldn’t… the visibility was less than 50 feet. And so the traffic was backed up again, but we had several, several accidents on both sides of the motorway.”

A mobile morgue has been set up at a Charleston funeral home, Mississippi County coroner Terry Parker told the local station when confirming a sixth death.

Other injured were treated at the scene and at local hospitals, including several first responders, Parker reportedly said.

“Only in one of the worst war movies or a fire in Chicago or St. Louis, something we might see on the news in a big city but nothing like it in our area,” he told the station.

The names of the victims have not yet been released because not all of their families have been notified, authorities said.