A mix of snow, ice pellets and freezing rain has kept Fredericton road crews hard at work clearing, salting and sanding streets in the capital.
“It’s been a busy winter for sure,” said Fredericton’s roadway operations manager, Mike Walker. “We’re seeing a lot more rain and freezing rain in the winter.”
“Certainly when it rains in the winter it’s tough on the roads, it’s tough on our guys and it’s tough on the public.”
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Early in the week the region ran the gamut of winter conditions in just a short period of time, keeping crews on their toes.
“The storm that we had saw all types of precipitation come down,” Walker said. “Snow, ice pellets, freezing rain and then rain on top of that, so our staff were very busy over the last 24 hours.”
Environment Canada Meteorologist Claude Cote said the recent capital city conditions are the type that create havoc on roadways.
“In the greater Fredericton area we reported about 10 centimetres of snow, and that was followed by four to five hours of ice pellets and freezing rain,” he said. “Then we picked up another 30 millimetres of rain on top of that.”
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The wintery precipitation comes not long after the region experienced some extremely cold temperatures followed by mild, almost Fall-like days.
Temperatures hovering around the freezing mark, and just below zero, are now expected heading into the weekend and beyond, with little precipitation anticipated.
“It seems this trend will persist for at least the next two weeks,” Cote said.
Walker said while they work diligently to mitigate the less than ideal driving conditions, he hopes motorists will work with road crews to ensure everyone’s safety.
“You’ve got to be willing to slow down and deal with the conditions that are at hand and take that responsibility on,” he said. “There’s only so much that we can do when we’re in situations like that, so we salt our streets, but even in some cases yesterday that had very minimal effect.”
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