North Texans brave icy roads, chill

[TexasStooge]

DALLAS, Texas (WFAA ABC 8) - Commuters encountered less trouble with icy roads and accidents Thursday morning than they did with wind chills in the single digits. Most roads were dry except for slick spots on bridges and overpasses, where traffic was often slow, drivers and forecasters reported.

“I think a lot of people chose to stay in. A lot of people had off anyway,” said Nancy Leggio, executive producer of Traffic Pulse, which supplies broadcast media outlets with traffic reports. “We’re very lucky. I mean, I expected to get up this morning and it be just hellacious.”

One significant wreck was reported on Interstate 75 near Bethany Drive in Allen, where a southbound tractor-trailer rig hit a portion of the median about 4:40 a.m. Traffic was backed up for at least a mile as two southbound and one northbound lanes were closed.

One woman was transported to the hospital with moderate injuries.

Allen police Sgt. Brandon Price the accident may have been caused by a woman driving a Honda Civic north slamming into the median and knocking a portion of the concrete into the southbound lanes. The wreck was under investigation and it was unclear if weather was a factor.

Abolfath Shahsavari, a 46-year-old Executive Taxi driver, said he lost a $70 fare when he got caught in the delay in Allen and could not pick up a passenger headed for the airport.

“It’s caused me a lot of problems,” he said.

Johnny Miller, 51, was making a 102-mile commute Thursday from McKinney to Crowley, where he works as a sheet metal foreman working on a new elementary school. “It’s a little scary when you cross those bridges and you see that shiny black spot,” he said.

Leggio said bridges and overpasses in Collin County were reportedly still iced, but most places where frozen precipitation had been a problem in the Dallas-Fort Worth area had been sanded.

“A lot of people were concerned with the High 5, but it’s been looking pretty good,” she said.

What wasn’t looking good were the temperatures, which were registering anywhere from 12 degrees in Gainesville to 19 at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, where the wind chill was 7 degrees at 7 a.m.

Forecasters say the snow along grassy areas and icy patches will be slow to melt as temperatures remain at or below freezing Thursday and Friday, but no further precipitation is expected.

Blame the freeze on an arctic high-pressure system from Canada that’s hitting much of the United States, said Eric Martello, a senior meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Fort Worth. The Northeast, from Pennsylvania to New England, is where much of the snow will be over the next 24 hours.

Lonnie King, another NWS meteorologist, said a surge of arctic air expected later Thursday was going to keep North Texas frosty through Christmas morning. The forecast calls for highs in the lower 30s both Thursday and Friday, then dropping to the teens both nights.

“We get cold spells like this once or twice every winter usually,” King said. “Climatologically, the coldest part of the year is from the last 10 days of December to first two weeks of January.”

While sipping coffee outside an East Dallas 7-Eleven, Armando Alvarez of Dallas was contemplating what to do with his day since cold weather had canceled his job laying foundations.

Although he was thankful he didn’t have to scrape the windshields or drive in slick conditions, the bitter cold still was tough to take, he said.

“It’s too cold,” he said. “I kept putting on more clothes.”

When Teshome Sheferaw of Dallas left at 5 a.m. for his job at the convenience store, he had the streets to himself.

“There were no slick spots, but it’s very cold,” he said. “I quit smoking because it’s too cold. It makes my hands hurt. Now I drink coffee.”

By Wednesday night, more than 500 traffic accidents had been blamed on snowy, slippery roads in Dallas alone. That's about three times the number of accidents that would be expected on a rainy day, Dallas police Sgt. Paul Morris said. No fatalities had been reported as of late Wednesday.

Other area cities reported similar increases in traffic problems, but most of the accidents were minor.

Mark Ball, a spokesman for the Dallas district of the Texas Department of Transportation, said many motorists complained about the High 5 interchange, specifically the portion from westbound I-635 to southbound Central Expressway.

“The good news is, in the future, when that project is completed, there will be frontage roads through that project that do not exist today. So in the future, we’ll be able to shut down bridges and put traffic onto the frontage roads,” he said.

Transportation Department crews broke into 12-hour shifts to sand the bridges and overpasses of some 9,927 lane miles in Dallas, Collin, Denton, Ellis, Navarro, Kaufman and Rockwall counties. They were still at work Thursday morning, Ball said.

Precipitation during the Wednesday evening rush hour complicated their work, he said.

“Many of the motorists wouldn’t get out of the way of our trucks, which was very frustrating,” he said, adding that the drivers then would be forced to pass the areas that needed attention and back up. “And that just took so much more time … than we should have taken.”

At D/FW airport, more than 200 inbound and outbound flights were canceled Wednesday because of the icy weather, most of them on American Airlines.

Passengers waited while planes were de-iced, and delays of 90 minutes to two hours were common. But airport spokesman David Magaña said flights should be on schedule Thursday

While road problems in Dallas-Fort Worth were limited Thursday, holiday travelers face less-certain driving conditions.

According to AAA Texas, nearly 5.1 million Texans will travel over the Christmas-New Year's holidays, a 1.8 percent increase over last year. And the vast majority will travel more than 50 miles, AAA officials said.

They could find much worse conditions as they venture north. The areas along the Red River and Oklahoma reported snow accumulations of 2 to 4 inches, according to the weather service, and snow fell in a broad swath across the central United States.

Dallas Web Staff writers Kimberly Durnan and Linda Leavell and Dallas Morning News reporter Russell Rian contributed to this report.