AccuWeather's Tony Laubach reports from De Soto, Iowa, the morning after a blizzard swept through the region. Clear but cold weather chills the area as of the morning of March 6.
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00:00today a lot quieter there as he's out in the open fields which would have been just completely
00:04visible white you wouldn't have seen anything tony it looks at least a little nicer
00:12well you know you guys are wrong all right i'm not in iowa i'm on the moon yeah i chose this
00:19location on purpose here because i wanted to kind of show you you see you see the pattern in the
00:24snow blowing here the road we're on is a due north south road you can tell the predominant
00:30wind that came through here out of the northwest you just see all the pattern pretty much as far
00:34as the eye can see behind me this is what it looks like on the back end of this and you can
00:39kind of see way off in the distance the trees that is interstate 80 what you're looking before
00:44you here in the foreground very very beautiful on the back end of this not the case on the highway
00:50back behind those trees yesterday i-80 one of the many areas that was a mess we talked about
00:55last hour if you were heading out of des moines you've got four major choices heading north
00:59southeast and west i won i-35 and i-80 three of those four directions completely shut down
01:06yesterday we'll show you i-80 on the west side of that if you were heading between des moines and
01:11omaha was just an absolute mess there were several areas where we had multi-car wrecks
01:17predominantly semi-trucks that were having issues dealing with the ice we saw that common most of
01:23those ended up in areas where it was blocking roads and preventing folks from getting anywhere
01:28we heard on social media people stuck in traffic anywhere from three to six hours as a result of
01:34these wrecks if you were trying to get out or in of des moines yesterday very very difficult unless
01:39you were taking southbound light i-35 otherwise it was just a nightmare for a lot of folks here
01:45with the rain that fell on the front edge of this storm the flash freeze that occurred really
01:51complicated matters quite a bit all the highways essentially were almost totally ice covered you
01:57were able to kind of move around on those but obviously when you start to stop or you get those
02:02winds especially with high profile vehicles like semi-trucks that wind was basically just pushing
02:08you so a semi for instance that might be stopped on the road for some reason you get those winds
02:14it just starts pushing you and you start gaining that slipping momentum and next thing you know
02:17you're in the media and you're off to the side of the road and then you start collecting vehicles
02:22on that and then you get clogs and backups and then you end up with stories like we had yesterday
02:26with folks stuck on the interstate for hours upon hours on end i-80 one of those messes we've already
02:32seen a couple of vehicles just in our travel between Des Moines and here in DeSoto of vehicles
02:37that are still off to the side of the road obviously wreckers and crews are probably going
02:41to take another day or so to get a lot of these out and some of these are going to be very very
02:44tricky extractions for sure so we're definitely going to have some issues and if you're traveling
02:50on these major routes and a lot of folks are kind of re-up you know taking the time today to get out
02:56as they weren't able to do so yesterday be mindful of a lot of these cleanup areas here there's going
03:01to be some wreckers and some crews out and about trying to get a lot of these vehicles out of these
03:06ditches and median so there's still going to be some issues even lingering today and we do have
03:10more snow in the forecast here over the next couple of days along these routes not expecting
03:14the blizzard conditions we saw yesterday thank goodness but it'll certainly make for some
03:18some travel issues if you're heading along major routes like i-70 or i-80 particularly the further
03:24north into Nebraska and Iowa you get tomorrow so travel's still going to be a little bit of an
03:28issue but the roads themselves Bernie, Melissa much much better than this time yesterday.