Winter's late arrival in the Twin Cities and across much of Minnesota held its grip on the state for a third straight day Tuesday, leading some schools to close and making for white-knuckle driving for motorists who ventured out on icy and snow-covered roads.
By midday Tuesday, traffic crept along on Twin Cities freeways still littered with a rash of crashes and spinouts that started during the morning commute as rain with a little sleet tossed in turned to snow and the mishaps continued throughout the day.
"Winter weather is not leaving us yet," said Anne Meyer, a spokeswoman for the Minnesota Department of Transportation. "It's tricky for travel, messy right now, but it's going to get better."
The storm that has delivered almost as much snow to the metro in three days as had fallen all season was slowly wrapping up. A low-pressure system lifting into Canada will allow skies to clear and bring peeks of sun Wednesday, said National Weather Service meteorologist Brennan Dettmann.
But with that "it's going to feel pretty cold," he said. Temperatures will make it feel more like January as they fall through the 20s to a low of 11 degrees by Wednesday night.
More rain and snow is possible the rest of the week, but high temperatures will moderate into the 40s Friday through Monday. Thermometers might surpass 50 degrees by the end of next week.
"We need the moisture, and hopefully it will kick-start the blooming and growing season," Dettmann said.
New Hope called a snow emergency going into effect at 2 a.m. Wednesday to give crews a chance to clear away several inches of snow that fell on back-to-back days. Other cities could follow its lead. But neither Minneapolis nor St. Paul had called a snow emergency as of noon Tuesday.
The State Patrol has several emergencies of its own to respond to. In the 24-hour period that ended at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday: 288 crashes, none of them fatal, and 257 spinouts. Another 31 semitrailer trucks jackknifed, the patrol said.
Monday's rain prevented MnDOT from pretreating the roads, allowing for the rapid onset of slick conditions as temperatures dipped Tuesday, Meyer said.
"We saw everything out there, and what each version of precipitation does to the roads," Meyer said.
Side streets and lesser-traveled roads were not faring much better than highways. Metro Transit posted at 3 p.m. that 15% of buses are experiencing delays, down from 40% just before noon. The average delay was about 3 minutes, down from 7 minutes earlier Tuesday. Light rail lines experienced no delays.
Operations at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport were hampered a bit, too. By 8:30 p.m., 458 flights leaving the Twin Cities had been delayed, and nine were canceled, according to the flight tracking website Flightaware.com.
A winter storm warning continued in northern Minnesota where more than 6 inches of snow was expected.
In St. Cloud, another 2 to 6 inches of snow was expected Tuesday. Similar amounts were expected in Brainerd, Hibbing, Duluth and along the North Shore, the weather service said.
