Roads are finally being cleared around Kelowna, B.C., after a hectic Tuesday night commute.
Snow hit parts of the Okanagan hard on Tuesday, blanketing roads and causing massive slowdowns.
Cpl. Michael Gauthier said the Kelowna Regional Detachment was called to around 16 collisions Tuesday night.
“This included one particular incident involving 12 vehicles on John Hindle Drive at Academy Way just after 8 p.m.,” he said in an email. “There were no or minor injuries sustained stemming from these incidents.”
Gauthier was told that compact snow quickly turned to ice overnight and created terrible driving conditions across the city.
Mounties, he said, assisted where necessary and managed the flow of traffic in concerning areas.
Kelowna’s Public Works Manager, Geert Boss said the snow was more difficult, and that may be why local drivers saw some challenging conditions.
“We had a forecast that was calling for one to two centimeters of snow, but most certainly with a warmer temperature than what we saw last night (which) hovered around -4 C,” Boss said. “The roadways were pretty warm last night so when the first snow started coming down, it melted the snow and immediately started freezing over. Hence we saw a bit of a skating rink this morning. ”
Boss explained it as a flash freeze right above the surface, then more snow on top of that.
With no pretreating of roads, due to the forecasted rising temperature, that’s why things went poorly.
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“We made the decision not to pretreat but with hindsight being 20/20, we should have pretreated,” he said. “Pretreating is very expensive and it’s still a pollutant to the environment,” he said. “So when we pre treat, there’s always this trade off that we make, should we pretreat and put a bunch of chlorine out or should we not pretreat and save a little bit of money?”
The average pretreatment trip costs about $20,000, he said.
“We get it most of the time and sometime we don’t,” he said, adding 95 per cent of the time they plan appropriately.
Boss said both AIM Roads and West Kelowna did pretreat the roads, so conditions there were slightly less slippery.
With this snow event in the rear view window, Boss said they’re looking to Friday when more snow is expected to fall, and, like other city and provincial road crews, working through the conditions that have lingered.
Aim Roads said it’s getting on top of highway areas that posed trouble, notably near the Bennett Bridge and in Peachland where traffic was at a standstill.
“As forecasted, we received snow accumulation last night and into this morning, with some areas getting freezing rain,” AIM Road said in a statement. “Highways have slippery sections and compact snow. Our crews have been plowing, sanding and salting with some highway sections starting to burn off and become bare.”
The road works company said forecast models are showing temperatures to warm Wednesday afternoon, up to 7 C, followed by periods of rain and a low of 3 C
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