"Clearly there wasn't minimal risk?" You're kidding, right? "rescuers?" But wait! There's more! This is the hill you want to die on? two thousand cars south of Madison with their heaters on, stuck in a traffic jam for twelve hours while volunteers bring them coffee and donuts? You're gonna draw an equivalency between this and a mountain rescue in a Himalayan winter? A traffic jam that the highway patrol accepts responsibility for and says "yeah, we should have closed the freeway oops?" Goddamn right it's a gray area. But the thing about gray areas? They have gradations between black and white. Buncha motorists on a road that everyone agrees should have been closed? White. Not even in the gray. Shall we go gray? James Kim was gray. Whipped out his map, saw a road, didn't check the conditions, found themselves on this in winter. The map said "Not all Roads Advisable, Check Weather Conditions" and they probably shouldn't have been able to turn onto a forest road and he's dead, and that sucks, and there was ample blame to go 'round but at the end of the day, mistakes were made (easy mistakes, anybody-could-make-them mistakes) and while S&R might consider the Kims to be foolhardy, they wouldn't be considered adrenaline junkies. Nobody looking for you after your rescuers have already mounted an attempt that shall go down as legendary? After it has been determined that you have ventured beyond the limits of human and mechanical endurance? Black. That color is black. My beef? By going that black, you drag people from the light into the shadows and it's bullshit that we celebrate those who do it rather than condemn them.
Food and other supplies were brought to stranded motorists while county crews worked to pull semis out of the mess. But the main problem was communication.
"I want to apologize to all the stranded motorists who were stranded on the interstate that day," says Wisconsin State Patrol superintendent, David Collins. "The interstate should have been closed on February 6th."