'It was like watching Nascar': US snow storm causes 50-car pile-up which lasted five MINUTES

If you thought driving conditions in the UK were getting hazardous as winter fog descends, spare a thought for motorists in Wisconsin.

This video shows the chaotic scenes as around 50 cars were involved in a mass pile-up in Germantown on Sunday.

Footage released by the Wisconsin Department of Transportation shows the huge multi-vehicle smash as drivers struggle to cope on snowy roads with poor visibility.

The crash goes on for several minutes, as car after car fails to spot the hazard and skids into another vehicle further up the carriageway.

Twelve people were injured in the crash, but amazingly there were no fatalities.

Tim Miller, a Germantown police officer, was responding to another crash when he saw the Wisconsin smash.

He said: 'If people watch Nascar, and they watch the Daytona 500 or Talledega, where they wait for what’s called the Big Crash, where all the cars crash because they’re all so close together, that’s what this was like — only there was nobody there to stop it with a yellow flag and slow all the other cars down.

'So you had that big, huge crash, and then cars just continued to just pile into it and taking evasive action. It didn’t stop.

'You know, it was five, 10 minutes this went on for. It just kept going and going and going. I mean that’s what was helpless about it.'