Cautious driving encouraged as flurries continue
Posted Dec 18, 2015 2:21 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
As light snow continues to fall in Calgary, the city’s crash count is going up.
From 6 a.m. until 12:30 p.m. Friday, CPS report 93 non-injury collisions and 17 with injuries, and the flurries aren’t expected to completely stop until past midnight.
Just north of the city, part of Highway 567 was closed because of a serious injury crash. Among the crashes in Calgary were two cars hitting CTrains.
Staff Sgt. Paul Stacey with the Traffic Section said with high volume continuing from the morning rush, drivers should continue to take caution.
“You just got to have lots and lots of patience and you have to know that you need to leave lots of distance because it is hard to stop sometimes,” he said.
Stacey points out, in one of the CTrain crashes, the SUV slid through the intersection and a red light before hitting the side of the train.
“You need to have lots of space for you to be able to stop,” he said.
According to Environment Canada Warning Preparedness Meteorologist Kirk Torneby, the snow is stemming from low cloud combined with the cold temperatures.
“We’re hoping to see a southwesterly flow at the surface start to develop later in the day,” Torneby said. “It looks like this evening overnight is when the winds will start to switch around and start to help scour out that low cloud and any of the snow that’s developed with it.”
Torneby doesn’t expect any more than a few more centimetres throughout the evening, but as the snow continues to come down, city crews will be tied up.
“Until the snow stops falling, that’s really when the clock start counting down, so we’re still really focused on the priority one routes,” Chris McGeachy with the Roads Dept. said.
The roads were just as crammed in the middle of the day as during the morning rush.
“The only thing you could consider unusual is that the snow is continuing to fall so other than that, it’s really the responsibility of motorists to slow down and leave enough space behind other vehicles,” McGeachy said.
It’s a message Stacey echoed, considering it’s one of the common issues he sees drivers not do during days like these.
“What we do often hear was ‘I tried to stop, but I couldn’t’ and the reason why they couldn’t was because the roads were slippery and they were too close to the vehicle or the object in front of them and they tried to apply the brakes too late,” Stacey said. “There’s a simple fix for that and that’s just to go a little bit slower.”
