Icy conditions cause travelers to alter course
Posted on Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/JASON IVESTER Southbound traffic on Interstate 540 near Winslow slowed to a crawl for more than two hours Tuesday afternoon when several wrecks occurred on the rain-slick highway near the Bobby Hopper Tunnel.
Freezing rain on a mountainous stretch of Interstate 540 south of Fayetteville caused cars to bounce like "pinballs" off the concrete median Tuesday and backed up drivers for three miles but caused no serious injuries in Northwest Arkansas.
Car after car, starting around 10:30 a.m., slammed into I-540's concrete median, leaving vehicles idling as they headed south. Arkansas State Police troopers stopped drivers for more than a hour before they could cross the slickest bridge north of the Bobby Hopper Tunnel in southern Washington County.
"I told the police they are bouncing off everything," said Joshalin King, a Flagstaff, Ariz., resident who was traveling to visit family in Ozark. "It's crazy out here. You've got to stop them [at Fayetteville] before they get here.
"She told me it's worse to the south and to get off that road."
Mark Meadows, an Arkansas State Police trooper, at 11:04 a.m. told a state police dispatcher that cars were hitting the concrete median "like pinballs."
"A lady came by me in a silver Toyota Camry, and she hit her brakes and lost control and hit the concrete wall in the median," said Keith Knight, a Fayetteville resident who canceled his trip to Fort Smith to repair a commercial heating system after seeing the crash. "I wanted to get to her, but I couldn't. I tried to walk to her, and I almost fell down. People were driving too fast."
In Franklin County, a tractor-trailer spun out on I-40, dumping a mobile home it was hauling onto the highway, said Fred Mullen, county emergency management coordinator. The crash temporarily closed a section of the highway.
The weather conditions and consequences were more serious in other parts of the state.
A Jonesboro man died in Poinsett County in northeast Arkansas, and a Dierks man was killed in Sevier County in southwest Arkansas after their vehicles spun out of control while crossing elevated sections of icy roadways, according to the Arkansas State Police.
Freezing rain started falling in parts of Arkansas about 4 a.m. Tuesday, said Marty Trexler, senior meteorologist with the National Weather Ser- vice in North Little Rock. The heaviest precipitation fell along a band between Clarksville in Johnson County and Jonesboro in Craighead County.
It was a difficult storm to predict, said Joe Shipman, an Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department district engineer at Fort Smith. There was ice on highways near Mena, Waldron and Paris, but only rain-covered pavement in Fort Smith. Some weather forecasters had predicted only rain with slightly above freezing temperatures, while others had predicted freezing rain, Shipman said.
"We didn't know for sure what was coming," Shipman said.
Ozark mountain roads in north-central Arkansas were an absolute mess.
Authorities shut U.S. 62-412 between Henderson in Baxter County and Gepp in Fulton County, Arkansas 5 north of Mountain Home and Arkansas 178 near Lakeview. A section of Arkansas 101 closed near the Missouri state line after a head-on collision between an oil tanker and a box truck.
"It was so deceiving," said Rick Steiner, who left his residence about three miles east of Mountain Home about 8 a.m. "It looked fine. It actually looked wet. But it was unbelievably slick."
He didn't get far.
"After I saw the two cars in the ditch and the one flipped over, I went back to the house," Steiner said.
Several accidents occurred on state highways near Mountainburg and Cedarville, Crawford County Department of Emergency Management coordinator Dennis Gilstrap said.
In Little Rock, police worked 53 crashes - 50 of which were on bridges - between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m., according to spokesman Terry Hastings.
In Van Buren County north of Clinton, a tour bus skidded into a power pole about 6:30 a.m. Tuesday and struck dangling electric lines. The contact sparked a fire that consumed the bus. No one was injured.
In Jefferson County, Pine Bluff police shut down a fivemile stretch of I-530 at 6:30 a.m. for an hour after a tractor-trailer jackknifed and blocked southbound lanes, according to Sgt. Ben Grinage.
Arkansas State Police handled more than 200 vehicle crashes statewide through midday.
"At 8 a.m., more than half the major highways had ice on them," said Highway Department spokesman Glenn Bolick. "It went straight to the overpasses and bridges, and then in typical Arkansas fashion, we had a couple wrecks and everything backed up."
At the I-540 bridge just north of the tunnel in Washington County, Highway Department maintenance crews struggled to get past the long lines of idling motorists. The bridge was covered with sand and salt by 12:35 p.m.
"The supervisor told me the worst was from the tunnel to Arkansas 74," Shipman said. "The highway was 20 percent clear and 80 percent ice from Alma to Fayetteville at noon. But by 2:10 p.m., it was 95 percent clear."
Michael Teague, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Tulsa, said it's difficult to predict what impact weather will have in Crawford County and other mountainous area of western Arkansas. He said cold air "stays locked in" mountainous areas, and it often causes rain to freeze seconds after it hits the ground.
"It created a mess," Teague said.
It won't be messy today and there's no chance of a white Christmas in Northwest Arkansas.
Sunny afternoon skies and temperatures in the upper 30s are expected today. Thursday's high is expected to reach 50 degrees.
Information for this report was contributed by John Krupa and Dave Hughes of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
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