HELSINKI FINLAND
A rear-end collision involving several vehicles occurred on 18 October 2025 at Tippo on Highway 12 in Lahti, according to police. Photo: Pepe Korteniemi / Str / Lehtikuva
Traffic on Finland’s major roads halted on Saturday morning after multiple large-scale collisions, the most serious in Lahti, involved close to 50 vehicles and left several injured.
Two major pile-ups occurred in both directions of Nelostie, Finland’s busiest motorway, just north of Renkomäki. A third, smaller crash involving a chemical tanker happened on the southern ring road. The Finnish Meteorological Institute had issued warnings for black ice across nearly the entire country overnight.
By early afternoon, rescue officials reported that all sites in Lahti had been cleared and traffic resumed. The clean-up took several hours.
More than 40 vehicles were involved in the first pile-up on the northbound lanes of Nelostie before 9:00. According to rescue services, two people sustained serious injuries and eight had minor injuries. A second crash occurred minutes later on the southbound side involving approximately ten cars. No injuries were reported there.
Three police vehicles were struck during the incidents. Two of them suffered significant damage. The officers were not injured.
On the ring road in southern Lahti, a chemical tanker overturned before the Liipola tunnel on the route towards Tampere. Around ten other vehicles were involved in that crash. Authorities closed the road in both directions as emergency services attempted to stop the industrial chemical from spilling into the environment. No serious injuries were reported.
According to the police command centre, visibility was severely reduced by what they described as “Konginkangas weather”, a reference to the 2004 bus-truck crash that killed 23 people in similar conditions. Temperatures in the region had risen quickly from below zero, forming a layer of black ice. Visibility was near zero in areas where dense fog dropped suddenly.
Traffic operator Mikko Penkkala from Fintraffic stated that roads around Lahti had been salted earlier in the morning, but the conditions were too extreme for immediate effect. The road between Kujala and Liipola on the ring road remained closed into the afternoon as hazardous materials teams cleared the chemical spill.
Elsewhere in Finland, similar pile-ups were reported. In Tampere, 15 vehicles were involved in a chain collision on Pyhäjärventie near the Kolmostie ramp. Rescue officials confirmed that none of the 25 people involved were injured.
According to police, several smaller traffic incidents also took place across the country during the morning due to similar weather conditions. Warnings for icy roads had been in effect for almost all regions except northern Lapland.
In total, four people were confirmed dead in unrelated traffic and off-road accidents across Finland between Friday and Saturday. A 15-year-old tractor driver was killed in a crash in Lapua involving a car. Two people died early Saturday on Torisevajärventie in Virrat when their car left the road and hit trees. The fourth victim, a man in his 60s, died in Enontekiö after his quad bike flipped and trapped him.
Emergency responders said many drivers failed to react to the flashing lights of police and rescue vehicles already on site in Lahti. A statement from the police said some drivers did not slow down at all as they approached the scenes.
By late Saturday afternoon, normal traffic flow had resumed on all but a few stretches of road.
HT
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