Weather sends motorists slipping and sliding

A somewhat unexpected period of freezing rain led to a number of accidents and motorist calls for assistance throughout Cheney late last week.

Over the Dec. 4-5 time period, Cheney police responded to 16 accidents and nine calls for assistance from motorists. Of those calls, two of the accidents were reportable while three of the non-reportable, “fender benders,” were single vehicle accidents, 10 were between two vehicles and one was a four-vehicle collision.

Of the nine calls for motorist assistance, usually incidents of being stuck somehow, one was a call involving six vehicles that had slid down a hill towards each other. Although they came to a stop, Cheney Police Department Cmdr. Rick Campbell said the drivers were fearful that if they relaxed their brakes, they would start sliding again and impact each other.

“We pushed cars away from one another,” Campbell said.

Another of the motorist assistance calls involved a jackknifed Spokane Transit Authority bus. Campbell said Cheney officers had difficulty responding to some of the calls at first because their own vehicles weren’t chained up and the de-icer applied earlier by city crews hadn’t had an effect yet.

Officers walked to several of the calls for assistance, while one call was handled by the city’s Fire Department.

Public Works Director Todd Ableman said in an email that city street crews did pre-treat some areas before Thursday’s early drizzle turned into freezing rain. The rain diluted the pre-treatment, however, reducing the de-icer’s effectiveness.

“The Street Department was dispatched Thursday night and worked with police and fire to deice the roadway,” Ableman said. The steady rain forced multiple applications of the product in order to “gain ground” on the conditions and eventually lead to clearing roads and providing motorists better traction.

“It took a crew of two using liquid and solid (granular) product over five hours to ‘break the ice’ during this event,” Ableman wrote.

Ableman added that freezing rain is one of the worst weather conditions in which to apply de-icer due to roadways “re-icing” as rain continues to fall and covers the deicing product, reducing its effectiveness.

Regionally, the Washington State Patrol responded to 27 accidents in approximately four and a half hours last Thursday, Trooper Randall Elkins said in an email. Most of those occurred on Interstate 90 between the Tyler and Medical Lake exits and on State Route 904 near Four Lakes.

“There were also collisions investigated on SR 195 and SR 27, but most of them were in the West Plains area,” Elkins wrote.

As for the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office, public information officers Sgt. Mark Gregory said 11 collisions were reported in District 11, which stretches from I-90 south to the Whitman County line and west from SR 395 to the Lincoln County line.

John McCallum can be reached at [email protected].