Interstate Highways Are Snow Traps

Cars stuck on a steep hill during a March, 2017 blizzard in front of
my St. Albans, Vermont house.  Luckily for the drivers, this isn't a
limited access highway like Interstate 89, so the motorists were able
to use my driveway and those of my neighbors to turn around.
They weren't stuck for hours like they would have been on the Interstate.

Here's one of those problems in which no good solutions come to mind: Snowy crashes on Interstate highways that trap motorists for hours.

Under normal conditions, the United States Interstate Highway system moves people and goods efficiently from one place to another.

Along with us dweebs in cars and small trucks, zillions of tractor trailers zip back and forth delivery goods and supplies to zillions of places and people.

Until it snows.

There's no good mechanism for getting people moving again when tractor trailers jack knife on ice, or cars slide off the highways and into ditches or other cars.

Such was the case last evening, when a snow squall froze a previously just wet section of Interstate 89 between Burlington and Montpelier. The Interstate was basically a parking lot from mid afternoon into the evening because of this mess, reports WCAX-TV.  The traffic jam continued hours after the snow squall had ended, demonstrating how hard it is to untangle an Interstate highway crash.

Elsewhere yesterday, parts of Interstate 80 in Nebraska, Interstate 35 near Kansas City and Interstate 70 southeast of Manhattan, Kansas were closed due to a snowstorm Sunday, the Weather Channel reported.

More closures are possible as the storm heads northeast into the Ohio Valley and eventually southern New England.

Snow squalls are the worst, because they cause rapid changes in road conditons and sudden white out conditions.  That's still a threat here in Vermont Wednesday, which would make it the third time in a week that heavy snow squalls either shut down parts of Vermont highways or threatened to.  Wednesday's snow squalls here in Vermont might be the worst of the bunch. (There were problems with snow squalls last Thursday and again yesterday.)

The limited access of Interstate highways that make them safer with no cars merging from side streets.  But the only way to get cars trapped behind snowy wrecks, or any kind of wreck is to wait until the mess is cleaned up so people can progress to the next exit at least.

Sometimes, people are directed into those little patches of asphalt connecting opposite lanes of highways where cops wait for speeders. Then the motorists can go basically U-turn back toward their starting point but that takes a long time to accomplish too.

Police and first responders must give priorty to getting the injured to hospitals, investigating the cause of the crash, and getting things cleared in a safe manner that doesn't cause more injuries.  Plus, they often don't have the manpower to figure out a way to move all the stuck traffic behind the wrecks.

That's why people are often stuck for hours behind Interstate crashes. They're not the highest priority, I'm afraid.

My advice, and it isn't perfect:  Make sure you have a full tank of gas, especially in the winter, before you venture out.  If they say snow squalls are on the way or are already here, stay home.  Try to listen or hunt for traffic alerts so you can avoid gummed up areas.

As we enter a winter full of ice storms, snowstorms and snow squalls, you, too might be stuck on the Interstate for a long time.  They only way to manage it is to be prepared.

Snowy, Fatal Missouri Highway Pileup Illustrates Danger Of Speeding In Snow

Part of a fatal pileup Friday on Interstate 70 in Missouri. Big part of the
problem was people driving too fast for the conditions

This is really a pet peeve every time we get winter weather.

Why, oh why do people insist on driving as fast as possible when the road is icy or snowy? Why do people who've lived through dozens of winters not understand that ice is slippery?

As a result, there was another awful, tragic highway pileup in a snowstorm. This time in Missouri.

It was cold and snowing along Interstate 70 near Oak Grove, Missouri Friday when 47 cars and trucks piled up on the icy highway. Graphic video from a truck driver caught in the wreck showed vehicle after vehicle bashing into the already wrecked cars.

Sadly, one person died in this crash and several others were hurt.

In the video at the bottom of the post, you can see cars driving too fast for the conditions slamming into each other.

The truck driver who shot video of the crash can be seen trying to seek help for a person in a badly crushed car. I believe the person in that car is the one who passed away. If only the speed demons on highways during winter storms could understand the pain they are causing maybe they would slow down.

Or maybe they don't care.

True, visibility was poor and the weather was too cold for salt to work effectively on the highway, which is all the more reason why people should have been driving more slowly, or if possible, not at all.

It's certainly possible the chain reaction crash started when somebody who was driving slowly enough for the conditions still lost control and hit a guardrail or something. This can happen to the best drivers. But the carnage was certainly compounded by speeding motorists, as is the case in most if not all of these pileups.

This wasn't the only crash in Missouri in what was really not the biggest winter storm ever. Only three to six inches of snow fell. But during the day the Missouri State Highway Patrol said there were no fewer than 125 crashes with 19 injuries and that one death in the Interstate 70 pileup, says the Weather Channel. 

Please, when driving in the winter, remember this cliche or adage or whatever you want to call it: "It's better to drive slowly and wish you were going faster than to be driving fast and wish you were going more slowly.

Here's the video. Again, a warning: It's quite graphic, especially after the truck driver gets out of his rig. But I hope the video scares people into taking it easy on the highways during winter.

Heat Causes Highways To Buckle, Cars To Go Airborne

A buckled section of Interstate 90 in Minnesota last
week. This isn't the same buckle as in the video in thi
post, but you can see how hazardous they are.  

Last week when I was visiting South Dakota, a big heat wave settled into the state, sending temperatures up to near 100 degrees under blazing, unrelenting sunshine.

When such heat strikes in that part of the country, there's a really big hazard on the roads.

Highways buckle in spots, creating these big angular ridges on the roadway, which of course is a huge problem for any vehicles going over them.

In Sioux Falls, an hour and a half north from where I was staying last week, at least four roads buckled.  

I have to tell you I was nervous on the 80-mile trip from Yankton, South Dakota to the Sioux Falls airport for my trip back to Vermont last Saturday. It was in the upper 90s and really torrid. Luckily, no problems for me.

The same was NOT true along a Minnesota highway at the same time I was in the car headed to Sioux Falls.

A viral video, that you can see below, is a traffic surveillance camera along Highway 36 in Minnesota that buckled.

Some cars went airborne. Other motorists saw the buckle and slammed on the brakes, and cars behind those braking vehicles almost caused several rear-end collisions.

A lot of the roads in the upper Midwest are made of concrete sections, connected together by expansion joints.

This is supposed to allow the concrete to contract when its cold, and expand when it's hot, without causing major problemson the roads.

Sometimes, though, the concrete expands so much in hot temperatures that there's no room for the concrete to grow more at the expansion  joint. So the concrete buckles upward.

The buckling can happen incredibly abruptly, without warning. So traffic often gets caught in these buckles before highway crews can close lanes.

I guess every place has its weather problems on roads. Here in Vermont, most of the roads are asphalt. There's usually not too many problems in the summer, but in the winter, water gets under the asphalt and expands, causing frost heaves and pot holes.

You can't win.

Here's the traffic cam video of the buckled highway in Minnesota:

Here's Why You Should Clean All The Snow And Ice Off Your Car

A big chunk of ice flew off an SUV on a Massachusetts
highway and here, is about to hit the windshield of
this car, which was equipped with a dashcam.

It's snowing again here where I live in Vermont. It won't amount to much, at least here in the Champlain Valley.

Maybe we'll get a couple inches.

But I'll be damn sure I clean the snow off my truck before the next time I drive anywhere.

Snow blowing off your car can blind other drivers or reduce your own visibility through icy windows.

Worse, think about what could happen if the snow on your car turns to ice.

Recently, Massachucetts got a nasty mix of snow, sleet, freezing rain and rain. It was only a couple inches of the stuff, but it was heavy and it froze.

Watch this news report about what happens when that ice flew off an SUV and onto another car behind it on Route 495 in Haverhill, Massachusetts.

Lesson learned: Scrape the snow and ice off your car.

 

Departing Storm Turned Into An East Coast Ice Disaster

A Pennsylvania DOT web cam caught this
pileup on an ice covered highway Sunday.  

Yesterday and last night's storm unexpectedly turned out to be one of the most disastrous of the winter as freezing rain froze roads over a wide area of the East and caused zillions of car crashes, some of them fatal.

Up and down the East Coast, the National Weather Service, and virtually all other weather forecasting outfits, had predicted ahead of the storm that roads would freeze over in freezing rain from Maryland to Maine.

They sure did, and they did more than anyone expected.

In hindsight, which is always 20/20, I'm thinking weather forecasters should have been more strident in warning about the icy roads that were coming. But many of the highways froze more extensively and much more suddenly than anyone could have predicted.

At least five people were killed and dozens injured in crashes and pileups across the Northeast on Sunday. 

Parts of major highways closed in the chaos from Pennsylvania to Vermont, and people who were not involved in actual crashes had to wait on closed highways for hours. A hockey game broke out on a stretch of Interstate 95 in Connecticut as traffic halted amid the ice.

On top of this, there's late word from WPTZ-TV as of 9 a.m. today that two people died this morning in a crash on an icy highway in Essex, Vermont.

I often rail against people driving too fast for the conditions and I'm sure that was a reason for some of the crashes across the Northeast. But the pavement froze so suddenly and in such a slippery fashion that I don't think many motorists could have prevented the crashes they were in.  

Dawn broke on a snowy scene in
St. Albans, Vermont this morning.  

As bad as this was, imagine if this hit during a weekday? The worst of the ice hit during what would normally be the morning commute. But this was a Sunday, so fewer people were on the road than say, a Tuesday.

The rain and freezing changed to snow as expected across Vermont, but snowfall totals were slightly less than expected.

It took a little longer than originally thought for rain to change to snow, but the National Weather Service had said that was a possibility as they were forecasting the storm early Sunday.

Still, much of Vermont received two to six inches of snow, with eight inches being the most reported in Barton.

For the record, I was forecasting 5.5 inches of new snow for my property in St. Albans, Vermont. I received 3.0 inches, but a band of snow approaching my area early this morning might boost that total slightly.

Light snow is continuing in parts of northern Vermont this morning, and before all is said and done, some of the ski areas will certainly be reporting more than eight inches of snow from this storm.

The weather will be calmer across the eastern United States this week. A small storm looping southeastward from Canada could give parts of the Mid-Atlantic region  one to four inches of snow Wednesday or Wednesday night. Stay tuned on that one.

The Ice Season Cometh. Now.

Freezing rain contributed to this pileup on
a Utah highway a couple years ago. 

Once we get into December especially, and on through until at least March, freezing rain and sleet becomes a much bigger hazard.

Cue the winter weather advisories. And the extremely stupid people who insist on driving faster than a rocket ship on glare ice.

A huge area from Ohio, on through almost all of Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and the northwest corner of Massachusetts are in for some ice later today and tonight.

The concern this time isn't so much ice caving in trees and power lines, but people not knowing how to drive on icy roads, and causing crashes.

By this late in the season, cold blasts from Canada mean business. We knew that when the temperature dropped by 60 degrees overnight Saturday in the Midwest when record highs in the 60s and 70s becae bitter cold low temperatures in the single digits.

Cold air like this is more dense than warm air, and tends to hug the ground. When warm air tries to move north to re-establish ground, it glides up and over the cold air.

Often when this happens, precipitation breaks out as well. And it's happening now. The cold air invaded the Northeast yesterday and last night, and now a warm front wants to move north and cause a brief warmup up in that part of the country.

Much of the precipitation will start as snow. With the warm air gliding over the cold, eventually the snow will change to rain up above us by several thousand feet. But then the rain will fall into the cold air and re-freeze, turning to sleet, or ice pellets.

As the warm air continues to move north and assert itself, that layer of cold air near the surface will become narrower. So the rain falling into the cold won't freeze until it hits the ground. That's freezing rain, and even more dangerous for driving on than sleet or snow

The ice is smoother and particularly slippery, so roads will be treacherous region wide during this period of transition from snow to sleet to freezing rain.

None of this precipitation is going to be heavy, at least this time. So I'm not too worried about heavy layers of ice piling up on trees and power lines, causing them to snap.

Freezing rain exactly a year ago contributed to a pileup
on this Worcester, Mass. bridge. Photo by Christine Peterson,
Worcester Telegram and Gazette.  

But it only takes a tiny, tiny amount of sleet and freezing rain to make the roads really dangerous.  Last year, there was a 65 car pileup near Worcester, Mass because of less than a tenth of an inch of ice.

And it's tricky. In one spot on the road, it's already above freezing and just raining, so you think you're fine. Then a short distance down the road, it's freezing, so you're taken by surprise.

Then there's the other boneheads out there. You're crawling along, being careful on the icy roads, and the idiots are zooming past you, because they have to do their usual 80 mph, because that's what they always do and they're going to keep doing it.

Then they cause a pileup. I've seen YouTube videos of pileups on icy Interstates because most people are going slow, and a couple morons are speeding, can't stop when they encounter the slow traffic and slam into them.

These speed demons deserve a special place in hell for causing so much harm for other people, and also causing the inconvenience for thousands stuck in the traffic jam behind the pileup.

Why do these speed demons only get charged at most with careless driving?  If they hurt or kill somebody, shouldn't they be charged with murder or aggravated assault or something?

Will one of these icy road speeders please explain to me why it's so necessary to go so fast on glare ice? Do you want to cause deadly crashes? Are you in a murderous mood? Or are you too stupid to be alive, and somebody needs to take your car keys away from you because you are the biggest imbecile on the planet?

Thanks, I had to get that off my chest.

The worst of the icy roads will be this morning and early afternoon in Ohio and Pennsylvania; during the day in New York, and this evening, overnight and Wednesday morning in northeastern New York, and in Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.

The warm front will eventually win out, and the precipitation will change to rain and end in most areas by Wednesday afternoon.

But it's December. It will quickly get cold again, and we'll have to deal with freezing rain and sleet on many more occasions as the winter progresses.

Snow Squalls Roaming The Northeast This Afternoon Could Be Dangerous

Lines of snow squalls had emerged from Ontario Thursday morning and were marching across Pennsylvania and New York, heading toward Vermont and the rest of New England.

From CP24 in Toronto: A very heavy snow squall
bears down on the Toronto metro area this morning.  

The squalls only leave an inch or so of snow and last a half hour or less, so no big deal right?

Wrong. It can be a big deal.

Think of squalls like this as severe summer thunderstorms, except with a lot worse visibility and lot more ice.

When a snow squall hits, visibility on the roads drops to zero. The pavement dry a second ago, gets wet, then freezes instantly, turning into a dangerous sheet of ice. It's snowing and blowing so hard you can't see anything in front of you when you're driving.

From CP24,  a highway pileup Thursday morning
resulting from that blinding snow squall in the photo above.  

That is, until you see the crash in front of you and the road is icy and you can't brake in time and you crash into the ever-expanding pileup.

So be extra careful out there on the roads and be ready for changes in the weather that could come in a second.  The risk of these snow squalls will last in Vermont and surrounding New England, and New York the rest of the afternoon.

 If you can safely do so when a squall hits, it might be best to pull off the road into a safe area where you won't get hit by other cars.

Then just wait there until the squall passes. Like I said, it will last less than a half hour. Which is a lot less time wasted than if you were part of a car crash or road pileup.