Southcentral Alaska’s first snowstorm of the season closes schools and tangles traffic

Southcentral Alaska’s first snowstorm of the season led to slick roads Tuesday, closing schools across the region, including in Anchorage.

City police reported dozens of car crashes, and advised drivers to slow down.

Anchorage School District officials said the hazardous road and weather conditions prompted them to declare a remote learning day for all schools except Girdwood PreK-8 and cancel after-school activities for the day. The University of Alaska Anchorage also closed its campus Tuesday due to unsafe road conditions, and Alaska Pacific University is having a remote learning day.

Meanwhile, the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District declared a remote learning day for schools in its northern areas, with all others except the Glacier View School on a delayed start. Kenai Peninsula Borough School District also announced an array of closures and two-hour delays.

The wave of closures follows a snowstorm that started Monday and continued overnight, dumping up to a foot or more of snow in parts of Southcentral before tapering by Tuesday afternoon.

Meteorologist Kenna Mitchell said the storm dropped 11.5 inches of snow near the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport on the west side of town, with lesser totals in other parts of the city, including 6 inches at both Rabbit Creek and the Campbell Creek Science Center. Reports of regional snowfall from the Mat-Su Borough ranged from 10 to 12 inches in the Big Lake and Meadow Lakes areas, with a Kenai Peninsula report of 14.5 inches from the Kenai Keys area, near Sterling.

“It is pretty much what we expected,” Mitchell said.

Anchorage roads saw an increasing number of crashes as the snow arrived Monday. Police spokeswoman Shelly Wozniak said officers received reports of 70 accidents, 12 of them involving injuries, as well as 44 vehicles in distress from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday.

As of 11 a.m., Tuesday’s totals included 29 accidents, three of them with injuries, and 46 vehicles in distress.

Sgt. David Noll with the department’s Traffic Unit said Tuesday that the increase in crashes during the storm was roughly on par with what Anchorage usually sees on its first major day of snow each year.

“Most of the collisions seem to involve people either driving too fast for the conditions or following too closely,” Noll said.

Noll urged drivers to clear snow from their vehicles before getting on the road, and minimize distractions in their vehicles while driving. He also asked that people slow down, as well as leave two to three times more distance between vehicles than usual.

“The reason that’s important is that you can react,” he said. “You have more time and distance to react to a problem that occurs in front of you.”