Accidents continue to add up in Wichita area. Here are the numbers and road outlook

Sedgwick County 911 received more than 250 calls for accidents, including 20 injury accidents, during a 36-hour window around the snowstorm.

The heavy snow has stopped, but there is still concern about icy road conditions.

Ben Nelson, Wichita’s interim assistant director of public works and utilities, said road conditions should improve throughout the day Thursday as the temperatures rise, but the expected overnight drop will cause things to refreeze.

“We always have concerns about any liquid precipitation refreezing overnight,” he said Thursday. “Obviously, temperatures dip lower overnight most of the time, plus there isn’t nearly as much vehicular traffic to mechanically break up any sort of ice pack or anything. So any of the liquid that’s overnight a lot of time refreezes.”

He said things should be “vastly improved by the end of the day (Friday)” when the forecast highs are supposed to be nearly double what they are Thursday.

Snow, preceded by rain and sleet, started to fall in the Wichita area just before 10 p.m. Tuesday. It didn’t stop until Wednesday night, though light flurries continued into Thursday morning.

Parts of Wichita saw as much as 6 inches of snow, including a Feb. 2 record of 5.9 inches at the Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport. The previous record was 5.2 inches set on Feb. 2, 1913. Records date back to 1888.

Accidents started to add up when the storm began.

In the 36-hour period from 10 p.m. Tuesday to 10 a.m. Thursday, there were 256 calls for accidents in Sedgwick County, according to 911 emergency communications records. Twenty of those calls were for injury accidents.

For comparison, there were 58 calls for accidents, including 13 injury accidents, during the 36-hour period before the storm started from 10 p.m. Sunday to 10 a.m. Tuesday.

Multiple calls can be made for one accident. The calls include slide-offs.

During the 36 hours involving the storm, the most injury accidents happened Wednesday afternoon and evening. Eleven of those 20 accidents happened between 3:17 p.m. and 8:03 p.m. Wednesday. Seven of those happened between 3:17 p.m. and 5:20 p.m., when people would have been headed home.

It appears more than a dozen of the 20 injury accidents happened on the highways, data shows.

Nelson said the city’s 60 plow trucks, which also are able to apply treatment to melt snow and ice, have been going since 8 p.m. Tuesday.

Wind gusts early Wednesday morning reached as high as 40 mph. Wind gusts into the high 30s continued into Wednesday night before tapering off, National Weather Service data shows.

The northern wind would blow snow back onto roads that were recently plowed. Roads going east and west were especially impacted by blowing snow.

“We would plow off snow and then we’d come back hours later and we’d have all snow back right on the street again even though we’d only have trace amounts of snow coming from the sky,” he said.

The temperature drops overnight Wednesday also made treatment less effective.

“So we’re still able to get some level of melting, but it’s always a lot slower when it’s at 10 degrees or 4 degrees or 6 degrees,” Nelson said. “So we didn’t obviously see the improvement overnight that we sometimes see when we have higher temperatures. What’s looking good for us over the next, I would say, probably 24 hours is that the sun has come out, the winds have died down so we’re not getting big snowdrifts.”

Nelson thinks the snowplows could continue running throughout the day Friday. Roads recently plowed within the city can be checked at Wichita.gov/snowremoval. Road conditions on the highways can be tracked at Kandrive.org.

The city plows main roads and schools routes, but not residential streets.

“That’s really where people are getting stuck,” he said, “more so than the primary streets.”

This story was originally published February 3, 2022 at 3:13 PM.