Travel-halting blizzard hits Midwest

AccuWeather

AccuWeather's Tony Laubach has the latest update on how the snow is impacting road travel in the Midwest.

Transcript

00:00For a closer look at the travel impacts, we're now joined by meteorologist Tony

00:03Laubach in Des Moines, Iowa. Tony, we started wet and mild, but things have

00:07certainly changed there.

00:11Yeah, Jeff, we are definitely in a whole new era here, if you wouldn't mind.

00:16You saw this scene behind me yesterday. We had the rain, we had the calmer

00:20conditions. Things were much, much different for us

00:23today. A whole different story. In fact, we have

00:26really kind of improved quite a bit since this morning.

00:29You're seeing behind me, probably for the first time, you're

00:32seeing anything behind me. This courtyard this morning was just

00:37snownado after snownado with 60 mile per hour plus winds

00:41in the area here, but this certainly made for a traffic nightmare

00:45pretty much all over the place. I-80 westbound right now getting out of

00:48Des Moines is closed. I-35 also one of those culprits. We'll

00:52show you some of that video out of here. Up north of here, near north of Ankeny

00:57actually, there was at least 15 car pile up there

01:00on I-35 that had traffic in both directions completely stuck and

01:05stopped for a long time. A lot of people sitting in that backup for several hours.

01:09We were fortunate we were able to get around that. That opening clip you saw,

01:13kind of an interesting thing that happened there. As we were northbound a

01:16little south of that wreck, we actually had traffic coming down the

01:20shoulder. That fire truck kind of leading a line of cars down the shoulder

01:23in whiteout conditions. That seemed kind of like a dangerous thing to do.

01:26Unfortunately for us, we obviously weren't expecting to see that. We pulled

01:30off to the side. The semi behind me that you saw go by

01:33was not able to stop, so narrowly shooting through between that

01:37fire truck and me on the shoulder. Fortunately, we did not get in any issues

01:40there, but for a lot of folks that was not the

01:43case. You see some of the wreckage there left behind from that.

01:46We did see numerous vehicles being cleared from the scene

01:50later on. We were kind of running around that area as there were just

01:54many wrecks that were not even associated with that particular pile-up

01:57there on I-35 north. We also had other wrecks

02:00east of Des Moines and that created some issues there. I know some areas,

02:06some pockets of eastbound I-80 remained closed.

02:09Checked Google Maps just before we went on air. We do know that westbound I-80 and

02:14that is both directions from Des Moines all the way out towards

02:17Spencer, Iowa right now. They're cleaning up a whole bunch of wrecks

02:21from there. We know we had semis down near Newton

02:23that blocked the interstate. We saw some of that back up. You saw that

02:26earlier this morning when we were out reporting in the heart of that blizzard.

02:30Things have dramatically cleared out here now. We are dealing

02:33with more of the cloudless skies in some places, seeing some blue skies. Most of

02:38it's still kind of gray, but the winds have come down quite a bit. Obviously, the

02:42snow has stopped falling anywhere between three and five inches

02:45depending on where you go in and around Des Moines. Hard to

02:48measure as the blowing and drifting took place. Some areas,

02:51the ground completely scoured of snow. Other areas, you got drifts three feet

02:54deep. So, crews working to get the interstates

02:57back open. A lot of folks spending the night probably where they're at here

03:00today before they'll hit the roads to try to get

03:02wherever they needed to be today, hopefully by tomorrow. Pretty nasty

03:06stuff. There's a time last night when Des Moines had sustained 39 mile per hour

03:09winds gust to 60 with snow. Similar conditions there in Iowa. True

03:13blizzard for some.

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