Weather wreaks havoc across city, state

It was only a dusting, but the light snow that fell most of Monday gave Lawrence-area motorists fits.

During the afternoon and evening Lawrence Police were so busy with accident calls there weren’t enough officers to handle them all, Sgt. Craig Shanks said.

“It’s just basically the whole town,” Shanks said of the location of the wrecks. “The bridges froze first and everything then followed quickly after the windchill took effect.”

Between 3 p.m. and 9 p.m. police received reports of 57 accidents. Officers handled 25 of them. Others involved in accidents were told that if there were no injuries and the vehicles were movable to go to police offices at the Judicial and Law Enforcement Center, 111 E. 11th St., later and file reports, Shanks said.

There were two reports of injury accidents but no details were available.

Douglas County Sheriff’s officers were sent to seven accidents in rural areas but there were no injuries, Lt. Doug Woods said. Officers assisted about five motorists who had slid off the roadways, he said.

U.S. Highway 40 and Baldwin Hill were especially troublesome to motorists, Woods said.

Late Monday afternoon there were numerous accidents on the Kansas Turnpike west of the Lecompton interchange. Traffic was slow in the east and westbound lanes. There were no injuries.

An Interstate 70 entrance ramp in Hays is closed Monday because of a storm with blizzard-like conditions that hit northwest Kansas on Sunday evening. On Monday afternoon, the I-70 closure was extended further east, to Salina.

Light snow or flurries began falling early in the afternoon and continued into the night. Only a dusting was expected, although there was a chance of quarter to half-inch accumulations in southwestern Douglas County, 6News meteorologist Matt Sayers said.

The snow left grass and pavement wet most of the day, but that all changed around rush hour.

“The temperatures were cooling and all that water that was sitting on the roads froze over,” Sayers said.

City street maintenance workers were treating the streets.

The snow was expected to end by this morning but it will remain cold, with today’s high temperature only reaching about 37 degrees, Sayers said.

Most other area law enforcement agencies said they responded to a rash of accidents early in the evening but that the calls had tapered off by 9 p.m. Franklin County dispatchers said they didn’t have any accident problems.

Worse out west

The storm system that produced both tornadoes and blizzard conditions closed some roads in central and western Kansas, caused dozens of traffic accidents and led to at least two traffic deaths.

The Kansas Highway Patrol said Brianna Virginia Reed, 18, of Manhattan, Kan., was killed Monday morning when she lost control of the car she was driving on icy U.S. 77 at the border of Riley and Marshall counties in the northeast part of the state. The car struck another vehicle before going into a ditch, the patrol said. The driver and passenger of the other vehicle were injured.

The patrol said Eugene Huslig, 54, of Topeka, died Sunday night when he lost control of his pickup on Interstate 70 at the Russell exit in central Kansas. The truck slammed into a guardrail.

No injuries were reported from the tornadoes that hit east-central Kansas on Sunday. Parts of north-central and northwest Kansas received two to four inches of snow Sunday, according to the National Weather Service.

I-70 remained closed Monday evening from the Colorado line for about 250 miles east to Salina, with the National Weather Service reporting drifting snow and winds gusting above 60 mph. A blizzard warning remained in effect for northwest and north-central Kansas until 4 p.m. CST Monday.

“It’s probably going to stay closed for a while,” said Stan Whitley, a spokesman for the Kansas Department of Transportation. “The wind is really high out there. … Snow is light, but visibility is poor.”

As motels filled up in Russell and the storm continued, Whitley said, the interstate closure was extended at 3 p.m. Monday about 70 miles east to Salina.

In south-central Kansas, icy conditions forced the brief closure Monday morning of a stretch of northbound Interstate 135 out of Wichita.

Trooper Gary Warner said the Kansas Highway Patrol worked about 30 accidents in south-central Kansas, including two that briefly closed traffic on Kansas 96, Warner said. No one died in those accidents, he said.

“Where else can you live that you can have tornadoes and blizzards a couple hundred of miles apart? … Kansas is about the only place you can experience those two types of phenomena,” Warner said. “This time of year, drivers in Kansas have to be prepared for any type of driving condition.”

No rooms at inns

Joy Moser, spokeswoman for the Kansas Division of Emergency Management, said Monday morning that almost 1,000 people spent Sunday night in shelters along I-70.

In Hays, more than 200 travelers stayed at a shelter on the campus of Fort Hays State University, sleeping on cots and exercise mats. Another 200 slept at Northwest Kansas Technical College in Goodland.

“There’s probably not another day of the year there are as many people traveling,” said Fort Hays State President Ed Hammond. “I don’t know if you could have had a better test of our emergency capability.”

Mike and Ilona Dorsey, traveling home to Denver after visiting relatives in Topeka, were in Colby on Sunday afternoon when I-70 was closed. They wound up spending the night at Fort Hays State.

“We stopped at every town from Colby to here and couldn’t get a hotel,” Dorsey told The Hays Daily News. “Everything was filled.”

At Fort Riley in northeast Kansas, teams Monday were assessing the extent of the damage caused by a tornado, post spokesman Maj. Christian T. Kubik said.

“It seems to be rather cosmetic,” Kubik said, even though more than 30 homes were damaged.

Moser said tornadoes were reported in Marion, Dickinson, Riley, Geary, Morris, Montgomery and Clay counties. Most damage from those storms consisted of downed trees, downed power lines and some minor structural damage, she said. There also were reports of destroyed barns and other outbuildings.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.