Weather pulls about-face after wintry blast
Posted Mar 16, 2012 05:24:46 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
It’s a bold prediction in a country where the only certainty involving the weather is that it can and will change on a dime: News 95.7 meterologist Richard Zurawski is declaring an end to winter.
“We can say goodbye to Old Man Winter for at least for another six to nine months,” said Zurawski. “We’re officially rolling into the last few days of wintertime.”
Spring officially starts on March 20, but the mercury is expected to hit eight degrees today before climbing into the double digits for the weekend.
Zurawski said the Maritimes is finally sharing in the weather patterns which are dominating central and eastern Canada.
Fortunately, temperatures in Nova Scotia will not be as extreme as in southern Ontario, where the thermometer climbed to 25 degrees amid violent thunderstorms on Thursday evening.
The shift in the weather comes after two days of freezing rain, ice pellets and snow, that contributed to dozens of crashes in and around metro.
RCMP say at least 10 vehicles were off the road on Highway 102 overnight.
“In the period of about two hours we actually had nine or 10 vehicles go off the road,” Staff Sgt. Peter Ferguson told News 95.7. “The road conditions were so slippery out there in spots members were actually having a tough time standing up on the highway.”
He said officers were reporting travelling 30 and 40 kilometers per hour on the highway and were still having trouble keeping cruisers from going off the road.
“One of our members said if he had a pair of skates on you could have skated on it,” he said. “For whatever reason, that one stretch, and that one stretch only, was glare ice.”
Ferguson said there may have been more crashes, but officers found that after clearing a crash scene, the driver at the next had already maneuvered back onto the road.
Halifax Regional Police handled at least 28 crashes in town Thursday due to icy conditions.
An 18-wheel tractor trailer flipped on its side at Barrington and Duffus streets in the early afternoon, closing the street for several hours and blocking access to the MacKay Bridge between 2 and 6 p.m.
Icy conditions also contributed to three rollovers, two head-on collisions and four other major crashes during the drive home Wednesday.
