"Thank God that I'm still alive," Whitby said. *** 
 
 More than 100 people were involved in the Saturday morning pileup on Interstate 84, about 10 miles east of Baker City.  BAKER CITY, Ore. (AP) — Black ice is believed to be the cause of a freeway pileup involving more than a dozen tractor-trailers that left 12 people injured Saturday in eastern Oregon, police said. Black ice, heavy winds, fog and cold weather combined into what were extremely hazardous conditions. 12 people were treated for injuries at a Baker City hospital, with four of them then going to other hospitals with more serious injuries, Oregon State Police Sgt. Troopers are still investigating, but Hove said he believes it was a chain-reaction crash. There were several separate collisions over a stretch of about three-quarters of a mile in the eastbound lanes, Hove said. "I think we're fortunate that there weren't any fatalities here," Hove said. When he rounded the curve and started descending, Whitby saw the semi again -- but this time it was jackknifed across the interstate. "I just braced and hoped that everything would be all right," Whitby said. "And then I closed my eyes and prayed that everything turned out OK. That was all I could do." "When the second truck hit my back end, it spun my bed underneath the first trailer that I hit and continued to swing my nose around, and I guess put my nose underneath the second trailer. Two trucks were transporting hazardous materials. "When I saw those lights coming, I knew he was going to hit me," Whitby said. "I do believe, and I'm very firm in that, and I just held on to the wheel as tight as I could, tucked my head and just kept praying the whole time. And so if they would've pushed me even a foot, it would have crushed me," the 27-year-old father said. About 30 minutes after flipping his truck, Whitby was free and among the sea of others who had largely escaped serious injury.
– Twenty-six vehicles piled up early yesterday amid a dangerous mix of black ice, wind, and fog on an Oregon highway—a dozen of those vehicles were semis, and two of them combined to make what the Oregonian is likening to a "panini" out of Kaleb Whitby's Chevy Silverado. Whitby plowed into the back of a jack-knifed semi as the wreck was unfolding, and flipped. Then he looked up. "When I saw those lights coming, I knew he was going to hit me," he tells CNN. "And then I closed my eyes and prayed that everything turned out OK. That was all I could do." Somebody was listening, because after the tractor-trailer slammed into Whitby's truck and the other semi—"It was just metal crunching and glass. It was just all fast and loud"—two things remained. The shell of Whitby's cab, and Whitby himself; the 27-year-old farmer walked away with two Band-Aids. The other miracle? While 12 people were injured in the wreck, as one state police sergeant puts it: "It's surprising no one died in this." Highway 84 was shut while officials cleaned up diesel spilled from the tractor-trailers, but the AP notes that two trucks carrying hazardous materials did not spill. As for Whitby, he gets to return to his home in Washington, his wife, 2-year-old son, and baby on the way. "Thank God that I'm still alive," he tells the Oregonian. "Now I've got to go figure out why." Click through to the Oregonian for pictures of Whitby in his mutilated cab.