Road crashes top 150; snow forecast again

Woman missing after leap into river to avoid hit by rig

Emergency personnel tend to a pickup driver who lost control of his vehicle Saturday and hit the side wall on Interstate 40 eastbound in North Little Rock.

Emergency personnel tend to a pickup driver who lost control of his vehicle Saturday and hit the side wall on Interstate 40 eastbound in North Little Rock.

Sunday, February 9, 2014

The weather that set the stage for more than 150 traffic accidents Friday night and early Saturday morning in the Little Rock area and numerous others in central and southern Arkansas is expected to recur tonight and Monday, meteorologists warned Saturday.

Friday’s few inches of snow likely will be gone by today as temperatures climb into the 40s, but the reprieve will be brief because a cold front is on its way, according to the National Weather Service.

Unlike in some previous storms, the power stayed on Friday for most Arkansans, but traffic came to a dead stop on some interstates and local streets, especially in west and southwest Little Rock. Many drivers simply abandoned their vehicles, police said.

Despite the many problems on the roadways, no fatal traffic accidents were reported by Saturday evening, according to the Arkansas State Police.

However, a woman is missing after she jumped into the Red River to avoid being hit by a truck Saturday morning on the Red River Bridge on Interstate 30 west of Hope.

About 2 a.m., an 18-wheeler jackknifed and slid toward a multiple-vehicle crash at the 18-mile marker, where two women and a man were standing outside their vehicles, said Keith Stephens, a spokesman for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission.

One of the women laid down and survived the encounter. The man jumped off the bridge and onto dry land below. The other woman jumped off the bridge into the water.

The woman, whose identity has not been released, had not been found by 6:20 p.m. Saturday, when officials suspended the search because of darkness, Stephens said.

Game and Fish personnel and water rescue units from Miller and Hempstead counties are coordinating the search for her, according to a news release from the Arkansas State Police. The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department is also helping in the search, Stephens said.

Also Saturday, the search continued for missing Arkansas Forestry Commission pilot Jake Harrell, who was last heard from on Jan. 31, but crews were unable to use helicopters because of poor visibility, spokesman Adriane Barnes said. Extensive ground searches continued in the Ouachita Mountain area where Harrell had been headed as he searched for signs of forest fires.

“We’re pushing through this bad weather,” Barnes said.

SO MANY CRASHES

Little Rock police spokesman Lt. Sidney Allen said Saturday that vehicles abandoned in roadways would be considered traffic hazards and likely would be towed to clear the way for city workers to plow and treat the streets. Allen said the Police Department could not provide a number yet for how many vehicles might have been towed.

Little Rock closed several streets Saturday morning, but all except Reservoir Road had reopened by the afternoon, Allen said. The zoo was closed Saturday and will not be open today.

Little Rock police responded to 151 accident calls throughout the night and into Saturday afternoon, Allen said. Pulaski County sheriff’s deputies worked 30 accidents during the night, and North Little Rock police worked 14, according to each department’s spokesmen.

Arkansas State Police spokesman Bill Sadler said he could not give a number on how many accidents state troopers responded to because there were so many.

“A lot of crashes were not even recorded,” he said. Troopers would respond to one accident and move on to another without logging it in state police records, he said.

On Friday night, a state trooper in Pulaski County was involved in a traffic accident. He was bruised, and treated and released from a hospital, Sadler said.

OH, BABY

Emergency personnel weren’t the only ones helping stranded motorists.

Dawn Denton was watching from a window in her North Little Rock home Friday night as vehicle after vehicle slid down a hill on McCain Boulevard at JFK Boulevard.

When one of the vehicles got stuck in the snow, Denton and her husband went out to help. Inside the car were two women, one of whom, Jerica White, was 8½-months pregnant and having contractions.

“I invite them inside and she’s breathing really hard … and she was very frightened and she was in a lot of pain. She was just sitting on the couch trying not to cry,” said Denton, a pre-med student at the University of Central Arkansas at Conway.

For two hours, Denton said, she and her husband called for an ambulance while preparing, just in case, to deliver the baby. No ambulances were available, she said, and every tow-truck service they contacted was tied up on police calls related to the snow.

White said one tow-truck operator offered to drive her to a hospital for $500, but she declined. The Dentons eventually dug out White’s car, and she took an alternate, flatter route to a hospital.

White said Saturday that she hadn’t given birth but was expecting to within a week.

Late Saturday, a spokesman for Metropolitan Emergency Medical Services had not returned a phone call seeking comment on how ambulances fared in the snow.

Denton posted live updates about White on her Facebook page, making her one of many people throughout the state who shared their snowstorm experiences via social media.

Greene County Tech High School dance instructor Amie Cole began tweeting about road conditions while in gridlock on U.S. 70, about 10 miles outside of Hot Springs.

“Having a romantic evening stuck on the snow covered highway with my husband. Oh the memories,” she tweeted at one point.

For about four hours, the Coles huddled under blankets, drank bottled water and watched episodes of Family Guy on a cellphone. They said they were prepared to sleep in their car overnight.

“It was the safest thing for us to do,” Cole said.

The road was cleared about 11:30 p.m., and the Coles eventually made it to Hot Springs, though Arkansas Highway Patrol officers had given them the option of sleeping in their car overnight rather than traveling on.

Arkansas Department of Highway and Transportation spokesman Randy Ort said officers Saturday morning “literally went out to wake people up and tell them to move on.”

There also were the abandoned vehicles, which Ort said made it “very difficult to do our job.”

Interstate 30 between Prescott and Arkadelphia was one of the highways most affected by the storm.

“We didn’t close any roads down, but that road pretty much closed itself down,” he said. “A little bit of traffic helps when we put chemicals down [on the road], but once traffic stops people get very frustrated. And if traffic stops moving, we can’t get to the places we need to go, and we ran into a lot of that.”NEXT ROUND

Although the snow is over for now, meteorologists said, it won’t be for long.

Snow is predicted to start again in the pre-dawn hours Monday in central Arkansas, with the area expected to get about the same amount that it got Friday.

Two to 3 inches fell in central Arkansas on Friday, said meteorologist Sean Clarke. Slightly more fell in west-central Arkansas, and not as much fell in the Conway area. Clarke is with the National Weather Service in North Little Rock.

Farther south, Pine Bluff and Star City received 3-4 inches of snow, Clarke said. But unlike central Arkansas, that area’s next winter weather will likely be more of a wintry mix of sleet, snow and ice that will pose a greater risk of producing power failures.

For north and Northwest Arkansas, snow is expected to start falling tonight.

Northwest Arkansas mostly escaped the snow Friday night, but at the beginning of the week is likely to receive a few inches of “light snow,” said meteorologist Ray Sondag with the National Weather Service in Tulsa.

Fort Smith and Ozark each received about an inch of snow Friday, Sondag said, and an inch or two is expected again tonight into Monday.

Most areas in northeast and east Arkansas got about an inch of snow, said meteorologist Zach Maye of the National Weather Service in Memphis. But the chance of snow or ice in the region again Monday or Tuesday is uncertain, he said, because of inconsistent forecasting models.

Ort said crews will be prepared to treat roads for the next round of snow, which, if it happens, will be the 14th instance of frozen precipitation somewhere in the state since November.

He estimated that the state has spent slightly more than $6.2 million on treating roads with salt and sand this winter, just above the seasonal average. While snow-pummeled states that include New York, New Jersey and Wisconsin have reported salt shortages this season, Arkansas faces no such problem.

“There’s been talk of that nationwide, and obviously it’s been a rough winter nationwide. Friday morning, we checked and none of our districts had any issues with getting salt delivered,” he said.

Entergy Arkansas Inc. spokesman Sally Graham said the company already has extra crews ready to respond to the next round of icy weather.

As of 4:30 p.m. Saturday, Entergy still had a few hundred Arkansas customers without power as a result of Tuesday’s ice storms. Fewer than 300 customers still lacked service, down from a peak of more than 48,000 Tuesday.

North Little Rock Fire Department Battalion Chief Al Cerrato said Saturday that extra personnel had been called in to work during the storm Friday. He said, additional staff members with all-terrain vehicles will work Monday and Tuesday, as well.

“They will run miscellaneous calls like downed power lines and deal with the overwhelming number of calls to determine if a firetruck is needed or not,” he said.

Spokesmen for state and county emergency management departments said Saturday that they’re watching weather forecasts closely and have teams prepared to handle a variety of problems.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 02/09/2014