Whiteout blamed for pileup on I-65

FRANKLIN, Ind. -- Police shut down Interstate 65 south of Indianapolis after a snow squall caused a 20-car pileup.\nFive people were injured, none of them seriously, media reports said.\nPolice shut down both lanes of I-65 for about two hours following the chain-reaction accident in the southbound lanes at about noon Saturday.\nRapidly falling snow caused a whiteout in northern Johnson County, the Whiteland Fire Department said, though other parts of the Indianapolis area received just short bursts of snow that did not accumulate.\n"You could barely see the emergency lights on the police cars," said fire department spokesman John Plan. "We were lucky to have no fatalities."\nThe heavy snowfall surprised motorists who had been expecting only flurries, Plan said.\nJohnson County east of Franklin received about 5 inches of snow by 2 p.m., the National Weather Service said. The snowfall was part of a narrow band of snow that began in Muncie at 9 a.m. and stretched south to Nashville, Ind.\nChad Omitt, a weather service meteorologist in Indianapolis, said cold temperatures about 10,000 to 15,000 feet in the air mixing with the warm ground temperatures created an unstable atmosphere, producing random snow squalls.\n"You don't see this too often," he said. "It's convective snow. Think of it as scattered showers in the springtime. Just so happens it came in the form of scattered snow showers"