A 17-year-old driver slid off the road Wednesday and into the Black River as ice and sleet blanketed the region, disrupting traffic and resulting in numerous accidents.
The accident occurred shortly before noon on the outskirts of Poplar Bluff, along County Road 607, east of the city’s portion of Ashcroft Road, according to officials.
The driver was out of his pickup truck by the time help arrived. No serious injuries were reported from this or many of the other accidents through the afternoon and evening.
Troop E officials responded to 227 calls for service Wednesday across Southeast Missouri, but mostly in the eastern portion of Troop E. This included 89 stranded motorists and 102 crashes, 11 of which had injuries.
The Butler County area may have escaped the worst of it.
“The Poplar Bluff area had kind of a mixture of snow, sleet and freezing rain,” said Derrick Snyder, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Paducah, Kentucky.
The mixture, Snyder said, helped keep the threat of power outages down in the area.
By mid-morning Thursday, Snyder said, the “bulk of the precipitation has moved out of Southeast Missouri, but there could be some lingering flurries in the afternoon, although they shouldn’t amount to much.”
The accumulations of ice and sleet on area roadways from Wednesday’s storm, Snyder said, made them “very treacherous.”
Sgt. Clark Parrott, public information officer for Troop E of the Missouri State Highway Patrol, agreed.
“It is still not any better than it was yesterday,” Parrott said mid-morning Thursday. “We’re still out working slide-offs and crashes.”
There were no fatal accidents, Parrott said.
The worst area was in the eastern portion of Troop E, Parrott said, around the I-55, I-57 and US Highway 60 corridors.
“The freezing rain and sleet pretty much stayed constant over there,” Parrott said. “At one point, we had Interstate 55, Interstate 57 and US 60 all shut down because of tractor-trailer accidents. Traffic backed up for several miles.”
A tractor trailer also ran off Highway 67, south of Neelyville, Wednesday morning, but nobody was injured.
On Thursday, Troop E officers had responded to 35 calls for service, including 19 stranded motorists and 16 crashes with three injuries by mid-morning, Parrott said.
Poplar Bluff police patrolmen responded to only seven accidents Wednesday, three of which resulted in injuries.
“That was really surprising. I thought it would be triple that,” said Detective Bryce Colvin.
By mid-morning Thursday, patrolmen had worked another two accidents and assisted the highway patrol with a third, and Colvin reported much lighter traffic than the day before.
Poplar Bluff Street Department crews are “doing what we can,” said Superintendent Jerry Lawson of the roads, but conditions aren’t conducive for much improvement.
“There’s just not a whole lot you can do with it at this temperature,” Lawson said.
Crews, Lawson said, have been putting down primarily pea gravel and rock salt “mostly at intersections right now,” Lawson said.
For the salt to be effective, Lawson said, the temperature needs to warm up just a little bit.
That means the roads will be slick for some time.
“Do not drive,” urged Parrott. “We’re urging people to stay off the roadways.”
The Missouri Department of Transportation is urging the same precaution, Parrott said.
“Don’t leave the house in this, because you’re just not going to get the traction where you need it, and you’ll end up having to pay a tow truck to get you probably,” Lawson added.
While the ice storm has left the region, danger remains over the coming days as a mass of brutal cold air moves over the lower Midwest.
“We’re expecting quiet weather through the weekend, but it’s going to be quite chilly, especially as we get into Saturday night and Sunday night,” said Snyder at the National Weather Service.
NWS information suggests lows Saturday and Sunday nights into the lower single digits, with wind chills as low as -12 degrees Monday morning.
Below normal temperatures will linger for most of next week as well, Snyder said.
“We should see a little bit of a rebound after the weekend, but we’re still looking at high temperatures in the upper 20s to around freezing and low temperatures in the teens next week,” Snyder said. “It’s definitely going to stay chilly going forward.”
On top of the cold weather is the threat of heavy snow next week.
“That’s the next system we’re watching. There’s potential there to cause snowfall issues on the roads, but since it’s so far out, our confidence is still low on any one outcome,” Snyder said.
“People should stay tuned to the forecast, especially as we go through the weekend and things get a little bit clearer,” he recommended.