Don't Try This At Home: Near Miss, Truck In Lake

We wrote an article last week about what causes slick roads during snow (yeah duh, it's the snow, but what meteorologically and physically leads to the sudden squalls and the black ice). In that article today, we posted this video taken live during a pileup in the West Virginia snow Tuesday:

My thoughts: First, this guy is going way too fast for snowy conditions -- it doesn't matter how quick the snow started, although as he points out on YouTube, he decided to not brake for obvious reasons. He should have geared down. That said, both he and the semi driver showed amazing dexterity in avoiding the vehicles (as much as we can see here anyway). As soon as you see snow start to fall, you need to slow down, or this could happen to you! These types of snow events are very heavy but also normally short-lived.

Speaking of semis, this morning a Target semi-truck ran off the road and sunk into an icy lake in Monticello (near Minneapolis), Minnesota around 6:30 local time this morning (more at KARE; photo via MN DPS). You'd think snow or ice might have been the cause but in fact there is no snow on the ground there, as a second video confirms, showing partly cloudy skies with no fog. Doesn't appear as of this writing that wind could have been a problem either. Late morning, the MN DOT reported that roads were good.