One person also was killed in Indiana when at least 20 vehicles piled up amid heavy fog on a highway east of South Bend. Numerous others were injured.
The National Weather Service had issued a dense fog advisory for the area, saying visibility could be less than a quarter of a mile.
In Michigan, about 50 vehicles wrecked in one pileup on Interstate 96 outside Lansing on Wednesday afternoon, killing one person, police said. Another person was killed when five vehicles crashed into each other 30 minutes later several miles to the east.
The rest of the vehicles were involved in minor collisions on I-96 around the same time, police said.
``The fog was really bad,'' Keena Sioui, a college student who witnessed the crashes while riding with her brother, told Detroit television station WXYZ. ``You could only see about 20 feet in front of you. Then we heard three `slams' in back of us, one after the other, and cars just kept hitting. We kept moving forward so we wouldn't get hit.''
State police closed a 12-mile stretch of the highway in both directions following the accidents.
The chain-reaction collision in Indiana on Wednesday morning left wrecked vehicles scattered in both eastbound and westbound lanes over a three-mile stretch of the road, state police Sgt. Rodger Popplewell said. Police closed a 43-mile stretch of the highway in both directions for several hours.
The pileup involved several tractor-trailers, some of which had their engines torn off, Popplewell said. Two ambulances were struck by semitrailers as paramedics treated injured drivers, Popplewell said. No emergency workers were hurt.
Hospitals reported admitting at least seven injured people from the crash.
