AccuWeather's Tony Laubach has the latest update on how the snow is impacting road travel in the Midwest.
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00:00For a closer look at the travel impacts, we're now joined by meteorologist Tony
00:03Laubach in Des Moines, Iowa. Tony, we started wet and mild, but things have
00:07certainly changed there.
00:11Yeah, Jeff, we are definitely in a whole new era here, if you wouldn't mind.
00:16You saw this scene behind me yesterday. We had the rain, we had the calmer
00:20conditions. Things were much, much different for us
00:23today. A whole different story. In fact, we have
00:26really kind of improved quite a bit since this morning.
00:29You're seeing behind me, probably for the first time, you're
00:32seeing anything behind me. This courtyard this morning was just
00:37snownado after snownado with 60 mile per hour plus winds
00:41in the area here, but this certainly made for a traffic nightmare
00:45pretty much all over the place. I-80 westbound right now getting out of
00:48Des Moines is closed. I-35 also one of those culprits. We'll
00:52show you some of that video out of here. Up north of here, near north of Ankeny
00:57actually, there was at least 15 car pile up there
01:00on I-35 that had traffic in both directions completely stuck and
01:05stopped for a long time. A lot of people sitting in that backup for several hours.
01:09We were fortunate we were able to get around that. That opening clip you saw,
01:13kind of an interesting thing that happened there. As we were northbound a
01:16little south of that wreck, we actually had traffic coming down the
01:20shoulder. That fire truck kind of leading a line of cars down the shoulder
01:23in whiteout conditions. That seemed kind of like a dangerous thing to do.
01:26Unfortunately for us, we obviously weren't expecting to see that. We pulled
01:30off to the side. The semi behind me that you saw go by
01:33was not able to stop, so narrowly shooting through between that
01:37fire truck and me on the shoulder. Fortunately, we did not get in any issues
01:40there, but for a lot of folks that was not the
01:43case. You see some of the wreckage there left behind from that.
01:46We did see numerous vehicles being cleared from the scene
01:50later on. We were kind of running around that area as there were just
01:54many wrecks that were not even associated with that particular pile-up
01:57there on I-35 north. We also had other wrecks
02:00east of Des Moines and that created some issues there. I know some areas,
02:06some pockets of eastbound I-80 remained closed.
02:09Checked Google Maps just before we went on air. We do know that westbound I-80 and
02:14that is both directions from Des Moines all the way out towards
02:17Spencer, Iowa right now. They're cleaning up a whole bunch of wrecks
02:21from there. We know we had semis down near Newton
02:23that blocked the interstate. We saw some of that back up. You saw that
02:26earlier this morning when we were out reporting in the heart of that blizzard.
02:30Things have dramatically cleared out here now. We are dealing
02:33with more of the cloudless skies in some places, seeing some blue skies. Most of
02:38it's still kind of gray, but the winds have come down quite a bit. Obviously, the
02:42snow has stopped falling anywhere between three and five inches
02:45depending on where you go in and around Des Moines. Hard to
02:48measure as the blowing and drifting took place. Some areas,
02:51the ground completely scoured of snow. Other areas, you got drifts three feet
02:54deep. So, crews working to get the interstates
02:57back open. A lot of folks spending the night probably where they're at here
03:00today before they'll hit the roads to try to get
03:02wherever they needed to be today, hopefully by tomorrow. Pretty nasty
03:06stuff. There's a time last night when Des Moines had sustained 39 mile per hour
03:09winds gust to 60 with snow. Similar conditions there in Iowa. True
03:13blizzard for some.