Crashes greet first snowfall

MAT-SU — As of Monday afternoon, the number of accidents reported on Mat-Su Valley roads after the first snowfall of the season stood at around a dozen. It’s an uptick, with most of the accidents coming outside of city limits.

In Palmer on Sunday and then again on Monday morning, vehicles collided at Glenn Highway and Arctic Avenue.

Sunday’s accident involved a 1984 Oldsmobile station wagon and a 1984 Subaru GL. A 17-year-old passenger in the Subaru was hospitalized. There were no injuries in Monday morning’s accident, but it did take out the traffic light — sort of.

“He ran into him and pushed him over and knocked over the little pole that had the crosswalk sign,” Palmer Police Cmdr. Tom Remaley said. “When that happened, it knocked the power out and sent all the lights into flashing red.”

Remaley said one vehicle was turning from the highway to head toward Palmer High School on Arctic.

“He didn’t see the truck coming and he turned right in front of it,” Remaley said. “Nobody was hurt.”

Other than that, Palmer’s doing fine, he said shortly after 1 p.m.

“We’ve had a couple of accidents the last couple of days, nothing like Wasilla or Anchorage,” Remaley said. “We get our share, but right now everything seems to be OK.”

Remaley was likely using “Wasilla” to refer to the greater Wasilla area because, while Alaska State Troopers had reported a handful of accidents in the area, at the Wasilla Police Department things were relatively calm. Chief Gene Belden was knocking on wood that it would stay that way.

“We’ve only had one accident since midnight and that was 10 o’clock,” Belden said Monday. And Sunday, the day the snow started? Just one wreck that day, too.

“Yesterday was Sunday too, and it’s very light traffic and this morning the roads are very good,” Belden said.

As for troopers, the first crash report to mention ice or snow came in at 9:54 a.m., in Wasilla about midway between Hyer and Trunk roads when a 2006 Chevy Aveo went into the ditch after the driver “lost control of the vehicle due to icy road conditions,” troopers report.

At almost exactly the same time a mile up the highway at the Hyer Road exit, a Big Lake man hit the guardrail in a Kia Sportage.

About 20 minutes later a teen trying to avoid that crash wound up flipping his Ford SUV in the median. He was not injured.

Then, at 11:42 a.m., in the subdivisions off of Knik-Goose Bay Road, a driver trying to avoid another driver at the corner of Edlund and Suburban drives crashed. Again, no one was hurt.

Somehow no one was hurt in a trooper-reported wreck until 1:02 p.m., Sunday in Sutton when a pickup rolled over after hitting the ditch on a sweeping left turn on the Glenn Highway. A child in the pickup was hospitalized, but troopers describe the injuries as minor.

In the last trooper report posted as of Monday morning, in the neighborhoods off of Bogard Road where it passes Finger Lake, only north of the road instead of south, a woman crashed her Saturn Ion into a power pole at 3:23 p.m., Sunday.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.