THE DAY DEERFOOT TRAIL FACED A HISTORIC CLOSURE
Weekend snowstorm led to unprecedented action on major artery
When he ordered a storm-stricken Deerfoot Trail closed, city police Insp. Jim Shaw wasn’t aware he was making history. Nor did he care. “I didn’t know that; I didn’t think about that at all,” said Shaw of enacting the first nearly total shutdown of Calgary’s main freeway in distant memory.
“I was thinking, ‘We have too many people on Deerfoot Trail, we can’t allow it.’ That was my goal — to minimize injuries and property damage.”
Shaw was pulling a shift as duty inspector in the Real Time Operations Centre in city police headquarters on 47 Street N.E. when he glimpsed on a radar screen an ugly blast of winter weather descending swiftly on the city late Saturday morning.
Within minutes, wind-whipped pandemonium ensued along many arteries in the city, but the worst impact was on Deerfoot Trail’s northern reaches, he said.
“It originally started in the north around Beddington and it kept piling people up, who kept coming southbound,” said Shaw of the bedlam play-by-play blasting on his police radio. “People were panicking, spinning out of control.”
After the first collision around 11 a.m., the mayhem rapidly snowballed, he said, with police district sergeants down Deerfoot’s length beginning to voice alarm.
Soon enough, the notoriously icy Calf Robe Bridge became embroiled in the slippery chaos and Shaw made the call to shut down southbound Deerfoot between McKnight Boulevard and 16th Avenue.
A hurried discussion with a battalionfire chief who reported more crashes on the freeway at Southland Drive was the tipping point, said Shaw.
“He asked who has authority to close down Deerfoot, and it had progressed to the point where it was unreasonable to close down only sections,” he said.
At 12:40 p.m., Shaw made the call to shut down both directions of the city’s provincially-maintained major asphalt lifeline, an order extendingfrom McKnight Boulevard in the north to Stoney Trail in the south.
Carmacks snowplows were already on the road doing routine winter maintenance.
For Shaw, precedent for such a move was set in Ontario, where as an officer he’d seen a snow-lashed Highway 400 north of Toronto closed down.
Sealing off interchanges and ramps feeding Deerfoot quickly followed.
The safety of emergency crews rescuing stranded motorists and the stricken drivers themselves were the prime motivation for the decision, said Shaw.
A radio channel was set up and word sent out to other police units, “so we could put all our resources on Deerfoot,” he added.
Tow truck driver and supervisor Jeff Hribnak said shutting down the freeway was the only choice Shaw could have made.
“It was a whiteout; there was no visibility for the safety of EMS and police … It was eerie,” said Hribnak, from City-Wide Towing.
“Days like Saturday don’t happen very often. It was the best call for everyone’s safety.”
City Wide staff towed up to 70 vehicles from the icy freeway-turned-demolition derby, with Hribnak pulling out half a dozen.
Vehicles would stack up in clusters of three or more, even as many as 10 in a pile, he said.
One vehicle spun out near 130 Avenue, toppling a light standard onto the freeway’s southbound lanes.
Eight motorists suffered minor injuries during the melee, said Shaw. “It’s actually remarkable nobody was seriously injured,” said the officer.
The task of sealing off entry points to Deerfoot was eventually taken over by city bylaw and transit personnel, freeing up police to help sort out the carnage.
A fleet of five snow plows operated by Carmacks began clearing Deerfoot — first southbound, then northbound — in a staggered formation called an echelon.
But even then, a few vehicles managed to get onto the road.
“There were still accidents happening behind the plows,” said Shaw.
With stricken vehicles towed to a central parking lot and the highway cleared and sanded, Deerfoot wasn’t fully opened to traffic until 7:30 p.m.
Deerfoot has seen partial shutdowns in the past but “maybe never to that extent,” said Carmacks spokesman Gary Brooks.
Police say they’ve received no public complaints about the closure.