New father among dead in ice storm crashes

Jason Anderson cracked jokes during meetings and volunteered to help coworkers. He put in extra hours to further his career, and spent the last five years leading the office of ticket sales at Dover International Speedway.

Most of all, his colleagues said, he loved being a father.

Anderson, his wife, and their 1-year-old son were on their way home to Delaware from visiting family in the Philadelphia area early Sunday when their car slid into a jackknifed tractor-trailer on an icy stretch of the Blue Route.

In the pileup in Marple Township, Anderson, 33, was killed and his wife was injured. Their son, Ryan, apparently escaped serious harm.

On Monday, coworkers recalled him as a doting father and dedicated employee who was becoming a standout in his field.

"He was committed to his work, but certainly more important [than] that . . . he just loved his little boy, Ryan," said Mike Tatoian, president of the speedway. "It's just awful."

Anderson was one of three people killed during a nightmare morning of crashes resulting from an ice storm that surprised weathermen and motorists, and left dozens injured.

His wife, Kati, remained hospitalized Monday afternoon at Crozer-Chester Medical Center, where she was listed in stable condition.

Anderson graduated from Syracuse University and worked for the New Orleans Saints before he was hired to oversee ticket operations at a speedway in Memphis that was also owned by Dover Motorsports. When that speedway closed in 2009, Tatoian offered Anderson a job in Dover.

"He was the guy that anyone could rely on," Tatoian said. "He would do anything at any time. He wasn't just a 9-5 guy."

It was unclear how his wife and child survived the crash on southbound I-476. Police said that the accident was under investigation and that information about the passengers was not available.

Another driver, Thomas Brennan of Lansdale, was killed in the same pileup.

He and Anderson died after their cars slid into the tractor-trailer. A third driver was hospitalized with head trauma. Several other motorists and passengers were hospitalized with injuries not considered life-threatening from collisions on the Blue Route.

In a colossal pileup on the Schuylkill Expressway on Sunday, Eric Alan Blau, 31, of Philadelphia, was killed and about 30 people were injured. Police said Blau was fatally injured when got out of his disabled Mazda Protege and was struck by another car.

That crash, between Gulph Mills Road and the Blue Route, involved 60 cars and trucks.

Sunday's weather affected areas beyond the Philadelphia region. In Pike County, Pa., a 13-year-old boy died Monday from injuries after he was thrown from a vehicle that overturned on I-84. The driver was also killed.

Icy weather returned early Monday, but it was less severe than on Sunday.

Several accidents were reported overnight around the region, and speed limits on the Benjamin Franklin, Betsy Ross, and Walt Whitman Bridges were reduced to 35 m.p.h. Several SEPTA bus routes were shortened because of icy conditions, but resumed normal operations around 8 a.m.

On the plus side, schools were closed and fewer vehicles were on the roadways thanks to the Martin Luther King's Birthday holiday.

The Sunday ice attack caught forecasters by surprise. Temperatures were a few degrees lower than thought, and the rain sneaked in a few hours sooner than expected, said Sarah Johnson, a lead forecaster at the National Weather Service office in Mount Holly.

Just before daybreak, Gary Szatkowski, Johnson's boss in Mount Holly, sent out a tweet acknowledging, "yes, this was a bad forecast miss."

By the time the office posted a freezing-rain advisory, the region's roads already were lacquered with ice.

Road crews were left unprepared.

The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation had 146 trucks deployed Sunday morning in the five-county Philadelphia region, said spokesman Eugene Blaum. If PennDot had known what was coming, he said, it would have had twice as many trucks on the roads.

Hospitals across the region were busy treating people injured in wrecks, and pedestrians who broke bones when they fell on icy sidewalks.

Emergency dispatchers received hundreds of calls for ice-related crashes, including 100 in Bucks County and more than 75 in Montgomery County.

The Weather Service said it measured 1.84 inches of rain at Philadelphia International Airport on Sunday, breaking the previous record for a Jan. 18 of 1.06 inches, set in 1930.

@LMcCrystal