Causing an 80-Car Pileup

Amazing that all of this happened because one truck was speeding:

A tractor-trailer traveling an estimated 55 mph in whiteout conditions jackknifed across Interstate 80, setting off a chain-reaction pileup that wrecked up to 80 vehicles.

No deaths or critical injuries were reported, but the Sunday morning crash blocked the westbound lanes in western Pennsylvania for more than eight hours, state police said.

State police Trooper Ted Hunt said he was attending to disabled vehicles on the side of the highway in blowing snow when he heard a truck quickly pull into the passing lane and jackknife. He said two other rigs skidded sideways, blocking both lanes, and oncoming vehicles began crashing into them.

Hunt said the truck driver who started the crash was cited for driving at an unsafe speed.

Here's a question for those who've taken torts or insurance law (and understood them): is this truck driver and/or his insurance company liable for all of the damage in this pileup? Assume that everyone else was driving safely and there is no intervening fault between this truck driver's actions and the last car damaged. Can it possibly be that he is responsible for all the costs? If not, who bears the cost?

UPDATE: 1L Will Baude e-mailed his thoughts:

The doctrine of foreseeability limits this, does it not? I've never heard of an 80-car pileup before, especially without intervening fault, so under the same logic of Adams v. Morgan (that the truly novel is rarely the foreseeable) I can't imagine that full liability would fall to the truck driver.

In reality, a court of common law could probably dig up some intervening fault, whatever the facts. In Drivers' Ed we were taught about what to do when a truck had jacknifed across the road (namely, calmly swerve off into the snowbanks) and presumably many of the drivers here didn't.

My tort knowledge is so limited that I don't even know when or where foreseeability applies. Is it only in intentional torts where you're responsible for truly bizarre outcomes (like you shove someone, but then they slip and fall down some stairs, whereupon they are soaked in kerosene and ignited)? Or am I making that up as well? Sure is a good thing I came to law school, I've obviously learned (and retained) so much.

UPDATE II: Another e-mailed response suggests Mr. Baude might need to study a little harder for his upcoming torts exam:

Speaking as someone who's not only taken tort law but has been practicing tort law for a little while, I can say that in the absence of any fault on the part of anyone else involved in the pileup, the truck driver is responsible for all the property damage and personal injury caused by the unfortunate I-90 incident. Foreseeability's not about being able to anticipate the magnitude of the harm that can flow from a certain course of action. It's about being able to anticipate the type of harm that can flow from a certain course of action. It is entirely foreseeable that the unsafe operation of a truck can cause collisions with other vehicles. Leaving aside for the moment issues of potential contributory and/or comparative negligence on the part of the other drivers (and the concomitant causation issues), the number of vehicles involved isn't really an operative factor in a foreseeability analysis. Look at it this way -- what if the only other vehicle involved in the accident had been a bus occupied by 80 people? Would the fact that 80 people were injured in the accident (as opposed to the two to six people you'd expect to find in an ordinary passenger vehicle) affect your foreseeability analysis? If so, on what basis?

Oh, and as for the insurance company, don't feel too bad. The insurance company's liability won't extend beyond the limits of its policy. The policy limits, however, are unlikely to be sufficient to compensate all the people who suffered injuries or other damages. So, if this were a bar exam question, and you were asked what the insurance company should do, this is the part where you'd remember Civil Rule 22 and the notion of interpleader.

This is all making me wish I'd had a torts professor more motivated to actually teach torts.