Manitoba blizzard caused chaos on highways: RCMP

Manitobans continue to recover from a blizzard Friday that shuttered schools, business and highways, left vehicles stranded, and caused numerous crashes.

RCMP Sgt. Paul Manaigre said officers in Manitoba were busy dealing with crashed vehicles caused by poor visibility and slippery roads.

“We responded to 77 traffic collisions on Friday,” Manaigre told 680 CJOB.

“You’ve got 68 vehicles damaged, we had eight collisions with injuries, and unfortunately one fatality.”

Those numbers, Manaigre said, don’t include over 100 calls from people who hit the ditch and were stranded at the side of the road.

Manaigre said the number of accidents illustrates the importance of staying off closed highways.

“Youve got zero visibility, extremely slippery roads, emergency services are not in a position to respond.

“We want to get out there, we want to help people — but the point of a road closure is to keep people safe.”

Driving on a closed road can also be costly, he said, with fines starting at $300.

And while Friday’s blowing snow has subsided, extreme cold remains — Winnipeg has been dealing with consistent wind chills around -40 since the weekend.

The good news: meteorologist Scott Kehler says that won’t last forever, either, as strong southerly winds are en route way to push out the Arctic air. It’s part of what Kehler, president of Weatherlogics, calls an unusual pattern — from warm to frigid and back.

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“We’re back on that roller coaster and it looks like toward the end of the week, we’ll be close to the freezing mark,” he said.

“If I look out in the long-range, we go to the weekend… another batch of Arctic air is going to come down after that little warmup at the end of the week.

“Sometime next week, probably that Arctic air will disappear again and we’ll be back to warm temperatures. So it just keeps going.”