Overconfident that they would be OK, the tow trucks and cabs were all wiped out, turning Hakone into a “silver prison”.

[Joon] At the end of last week, the city center was enveloped in warmth like the beginning of spring. However, from the middle of the week, a winter pressure pattern is expected to return, and the lowest temperatures in the city center will continue to be in the low single digits. Snow is also predicted in mountainous areas, so it is too early to think that winter is over. This reporter experienced firsthand the importance of preparation this winter.

Suddenly, I couldn’t feel the ground.

In Hakone, where it is extremely cold and icy, accidents occur frequently. Some were stranded overnight.

On February 8, when snow piled up even in central Tokyo. Many people must have seen the headline on a TV program showing footage of people stranded in Hakone (Ashigarashita-gun, Kanagawa Prefecture). This reporter was caught in the middle of it.

On February 7, the day before the accident, he and a colleague were driving to Hakone for an urgent report. Because it was an urgent job, they were on normal tires, but by midday the sky was still bright, and the reporter was in no hurry.

The unusual event occurred on the mountain road on National Route 1 from Kowakudani to Moto Hakone, past the Hakone Open-Air Museum. The powdery snow quickly turned into large snowflakes and painted the road surface white. The hazard was set on and the speed was reduced to less than 10 km/h in low gear, but there was no room to turn back on the narrow mountain pass.

Just after 1:00 p.m., as we approached a downhill, we saw a car ahead of us that had hit a utility pole and was stuck. The car in front of him swerved into the oncoming lane to get around it, and the reporter swerved to dodge it, too. The tires were beyond their grip limit, and the steering wheel lost all sense of the ground. He stepped on the brake, but the ABS (anti-lock braking system) only activated and the vehicle did not stop. The car continued to slide slowly toward the stuck car and finally came to a stop after making contact with it.

I rushed to the stuck car and apologized, but the male driver in his 40s showed no sign of anger. He, too, was busy dealing with his own accident and seemed resigned to the fact that the situation was force majeure.

A closer look revealed that the hillside was littered with stuck cars with hazards burning. Around him, a police car was handling another accident. The police officer warned the driver that it was dangerous to drive any further on normal tires and strongly recommended that the car be towed. He also informed them that they could not ride in the tow truck, and that they should call a cab or other vehicle to go down the mountain by themselves.

Insufficient countermeasures led to “natural consequences.

This is where the real “distress” began. Calls were made to insurance companies, JAF, and local mechanics at random, but the response from all was, “We can’t promise that we will arrive today. Cab companies were also wiped out. We were left alone in the snowy mountains.

At a loss for words, we received a call from a towing company. They said they would come to the site, even though it would be late at night. With only this promise, he had no choice but to stay in the car. When I opened my phone, I found that SNS was full of information such as “many slip accidents at Otome Pass” and “chain restrictions on Lake Ashinoko Skyline. Not only the western shore of Lake Ashi, where the reporter was located, but the entire Hakone mountain range was in a state of dysfunction.

But how did the situation get so bad? The cause was not so much the heavy snowfall itself, but rather the “ignorance of equipment” on the part of drivers, including the reporter. A traffic accident expert who is familiar with the risks of driving on snowy roads explains the danger of driving on normal tires.

The worst enemy is the normality bias that says, ‘I’m the only one who’s okay. In mountainous areas such as Hakone, the road surface temperature may be below freezing even when the city center is clear. The rubber of summer tires (normal tires) hardens at low temperatures and becomes slippery like plastic. Going down a slope in this condition is like running as fast as you can on ice with leather shoes. There is no way the brakes will work.

He also pointed out that the lack of a tow truck was a structural inevitability.

When a heavy snow warning is issued, requests for JAF and road services swell to dozens of times the normal level. Priority is given to ‘accidents involving human lives,’ and those that are simply stuck or unable to drive on their own are put on the back burner. In other words, the idea that ‘if something goes wrong, just call for help,’ is itself naive.

If you are going to Hakone in winter, wearing studless tires is a “condition for survival” before manners. If you fail to do so, you should be aware that, as in this case, you will be the perpetrator of a crime involving not only yourself, but also all following vehicles and logistics.

As the expert said, the reporter, as a “perpetrator,” had no choice but to continue shivering in the car.

After 10 hours of work, we finally made it out.

As the sun went down, the temperature dropped below freezing. Gasoline was reduced to 25 km of driving range by the continued use of the heating system. A heating stoppage due to lack of gas was life-threatening. Leaving his colleague in the car, he walked along the snowy road and found a gas station with lights on a few hundred meters away. He checked with the owner to see if it was possible to refuel, and just after the snowplows had passed by, he carefully moved his car and managed to fill it up.

While searching for the gas station, the stuck car that the reporter hit was towed away or disappeared from the scene. On the contrary, the police and others had also disappeared. It seemed that they had retreated before the approaching night.

We wanted to get out of there as soon as possible, but even if a tow truck arrived, we would still be trapped in the snowy mountains if we could not secure a “leg” to transport people. Since the local cab company has refused to take us, the only thing we can rely on is a car-dispatch app. No matter how many times he tried to search for a vehicle, after a long waiting period, he would only get a message saying, “Vehicle not found. Still, after repeated reloads, we miraculously managed to arrange for a cab just after 10:00 pm.

At 11 pm, a tow truck arrived and the car was hoisted up with a hook. When he sank into the cab that appeared almost simultaneously, 10 hours had already passed since the accident.

When I saw the news footage later, I could not believe it was someone else’s accident. The “people spending the night in the car” on the screen were, if we had made a mistake, our own people. In fact, from the 8th to the 9th, the day after the reporter escaped, Hakone turned into an even greater hell. Snowfall exceeded 20 cm, and the temperature dropped to minus 10 degrees Celsius. Around Lake Ashi, many trucks and passenger cars were unable to climb up the slopes, and in the nearby city of Ito, about 450 people spent the night in their cars.

Television reports showed cars wedged into utility poles and drivers stuck for more than 24 hours, and there was also an infrastructure collapse that cut off water to 1,300 households in the entire Hakone mountain range. The reporter’s accident was only the “prelude” to this chaos.

The biggest cause of this confusion was the negligence of the reporter, who entered the mountain on normal tires, making a mistake in predicting the weather. Both public assistance and self-help will cease to function if the limits are exceeded. I keenly felt that making the right preparations is the minimum duty not only to protect oneself but also to prevent the infrastructure from being paralyzed.