Columnist Susan Snyder: A breaking news crawl on I-15

Friday, March 14, 2003 | 5:07 a.m.

Maybe our first mistake was being smug.

Upon returning from many weekend trips to California we've cruised an unobstructed Interstate 15 toward Las Vegas and openly sneered at all the losers who trashed their monthly budgets in our casinos, only to sit bumper-to-bumper on southbound I-15 in the Sunday exodus back to California.

"Wastin' awaaaay again in Avacadoville..."

Last Sunday brought our comeuppance. We were prattling along after a weekend in the Land of the Sprouteaters and noticed that there was no string of headlights heading south on the other side of the highway.

In fact, there were no headlights over there. None. For several minutes at a time. And ahead of us, about an hour outside of Baker, Calif., a string of red taillights stretched waaaaaay off to the horizon. There was a disturbance in the force.

We broke down and switched on the insufferable FM radio station that gives periodic I-15 traffic reports and the rest of the time assaults listeners with Top 40 drone.

And we heard about the collision of two tour buses just north of Baker that already had forced closure of southbound I-15 for four hours. The radio station gave half a dozen updates about southbound I-15, but never mentioned the northbound lanes.

Evidently FM 98 and 99, "the highway stations," are only about helping people get into and out of Las Vegas. Those of us who live here can rot like a bad buffet in July.

Acting on the lack of information given on the radio, we cruised past California State Route 127 in the center of Baker, which is the last turnoff from I-15 until Primm. This will be forever remembered as The Decision of No Return.

A mile beyond Baker northbound traffic came to a complete, dead stop. We wished we'd had less coffee in Barstow.

For the next 90 minutes our lanes of traffic crawled and stopped their way all 16 miles to the top of the mountain pass where the buses crashed.

Somewhere in this Black Traffic Hole Time Continuum, the radio lady announced that I-15 was open. Yay. Yay for the Sprouteaters.

We watched cars trickle past on the other side of the highway. A tour bus with a crunched front end rolled by attached to a wrecker. More cars. A tour bus with a crunched rear end rolled by attached to a wrecker. More cars.

We rolled something like 50 feet. After an hour, the radio traffic minion interrupted our cursing: "Northbound I-15 is backed up because of looky-loos."

The buses were long gone, so what were they looking at? We sat there in a stupid backup, on a stupid drive we hate anyway, next to a stupid pickup truck filled with stupid teenagers listening to stupid teenager music and dangling stupid bare teenager feet out the window and thought about how stupid -- and inconsiderate -- it is to be a distracted, looky-loo driver.

In reports published two days after the crash witnesses said one of the bus drivers talked nonstop on his cell phone, listened to music on a headset and watched the in-bus movie. The crash injured more than 100 people and closed the region's only highway for hours.

At least being smug never hurt anybody.