| Posted: Friday, Feb 15, 2013 05:15 pm
Whiteout conditions and slick roads sparked numerous collisions and landed several area motorists in the ditch this week.
A multi-vehicle collision on McKenney Avenue Wednesday caused a service truck to flip onto its drivers’ side, while several other damaged vehicles scattered the roadway.
The collision forced RCMP to close a stretch of McKenney Avenue for roughly one hour until the area was cleared of vehicles and accumulating snow.
Following the collision, police sent out a travel advisory warning motorists of blowing snow and icy roads on Ray Gibbon Drive, McKenney Avenue and Giroux Road. St. Albert RCMP Cpl. Laurel Kading said in a news release that the poor conditions extended north to Legal.
Although winds died down Thursday, road surfaces remained blanketed with ice.
Slippery roads sent one a truck into the ditch Thurday morning and the driver had to be extricated from the vehicle. RCMP reported the southbound vehicle plunged into the west ditch on Highway 2, roughly one kilometre north of the city.
Kading could not be reached for further comment. It is not known what injuries, if any, were sustained in these collisions.
Around the county
Poor weather conditions hit Morinville around 9 a.m. Wednesday, causing two semi trucks to jackknife and block traffic. RCMP rerouted traffic along Highway 2, between secondary Highway 651 and Township Road 572 for roughly one hour.
“We were called for the first semi that was reported jackknifed and then one was trying to avoid that one and then got in the same situation,” said Morinville RCMP Const. Yelena Avoine.
Later in the afternoon, police were called to at least seven collisions throughout the county.
“There (were) a lot of collisions that were reported,” Avoine said. “There were no injuries reported, mostly just people going into the ditch and things like that because visibility was zero (in) some places.”
Environment Canada indicated that winds reached up to 70 kilometres per hour in the Edmonton region Wednesday.
