Double fatality closes northbound and southbound lanes of I-35

UPDATE

At 4 p.m., the San Marcos Police Department announced that all lanes of I-35 were open and cautioned drivers to be safe.

Two drivers were pronounced dead early Friday in San Marcos in connection to a tragic combination of actions that started when a tire blew out on a truck carrying a load of gravel that was in the northbound lane of the highway near the McCarty Lane interchange. 

In a press release issued by the city of San Marcos, at approximately 8 a.m., a tandem axel dump truck was traveling northbound on I-35 near McCarty Lane when one of the truck’s tires blew out. According to the preliminary investigation now underway by the San Marcos Police Department, officers said the dump truck crossed three lanes of traffic, colliding with the center median wall. 

Police said the impact of the collision caused “the truck’s gravel load to spill into the southbound lanes.” The gravel from the dump truck fell into the path and onto a second vehicle traveling in the southbound lane on the highway, police said. 

Images of the truck on social media showed it overturned on its side, draped and lodged against the median. 

Police said that the driver of the dump truck and the driver of the as yet unidentified second vehicle were pronounced dead although the press release did not specify if this was at the scene. A Hazmat vehicle and crew were at the scene of the collision working to clean up the gravel and to move the vehicles from the highway. 

No other information about either driver is available at this time, pending notification of next of kin, police said. The investigation is ongoing.

Traffic on both the north and south lanes of I-35 was halted until early afternoon when city officials announced at approximately 2:15 p.m. that the southbound lanes of I-35 had reopened.  

City officials said that highway clean-up crews and police were still on the scene working to reopen the northbound lanes of I-35 to traffic. Traffic was seen to be moving on the northbound lanes at approximately 3 p.m. Friday.

Police had been directing traffic across the Centerpoint Road interchange near the Tanger Outlets through the early afternoon. 

The backup on both sides of the highway at one point stretched to New Braunfels and beyond Kyle.