Icy roads take toll in rush hour

By Ed Runyan

One Trumbull County salt truck had to have a police escort so it could make it out to treat county roads.

WARREN — Rush hour in places such as Bazetta Township turned into a nightmare commute Tuesday afternoon, as hundreds of drivers learned their vehicles’ brakes did them absolutely no good.

“I am a 27-year veteran of this industry, and I’ve never seen it as bad as this,” said Doug Emerine, owner of Emerine’s Towing of Champion.

Emerine said his company received more than 100 calls between 3 and 7 p.m. from drivers needing assistance in getting their vehicle out of a ditch, front yard or towed away from a collision.

The most memorable for him was when he responded to state Route 305 in Bazetta Township near the intersection with Durst Clagg Road to pull a woman’s car out of a front yard and ended up playing dodge ’em with a dozen cars coming up from behind that couldn’t stop.

“In a matter of 30 seconds, 10 to 12 more cars were off the road,” he said.

Mo Alherimi, who was at his parents’ house on Route 305 Tuesday afternoon, said the scene was unlike anything he’d ever experienced.

A woman coming down Route 305 lost control of her car in the front yard of Alherimi’s parents’ house, and she spent an hour at the house trying to calm her nerves before deciding to call an Emerine’s tow truck, Alherimi said.

Around 6 p.m., the truck arrived, and that’s when the real trouble started.

First a car slid off the road behind the tow truck because it couldn’t stop.

That led other cars to slide off the road. Broken mailboxes and tire tracks were visible in the area Wednesday.

Emerine tried to pull his truck farther ahead to avoid the sliding cars, eventually ending up many houses up the road, Alherimi said.

Alherimi said he could understand what the drivers were experiencing because when he drove to his parents house earlier, he slid past the driveway. The brakes on his car were useless because of the icy road conditions.

Next door, a Bazetta man arrived Wednesday with a new mailbox, a post and some cement so he could replace the one his son knocked down Tuesday.

Lt. Joseph Dragovich, commander of the Warren post of the Ohio State Highway Patrol, said he can never recall having so many “stacked” calls for service as there were between 3 and 8 p.m. Tuesday. By stacked, he meant calls occurring at the same time.

“It was a fluke,” he said of the icy conditions that lasted for so many hours without letting up.

Dragovich said if there is one lesson to be learned, it is that if weather forecasters are calling for icy and slippery conditions, slow down before it is apparent that you have to.

Jim DiCenso, a highway supervisor for the Trumbull County engineer’s office, said his department took the unusual step of laying down a salt-and-grit mixture to roads twice Tuesday afternoon, using twice as much mixture.

Among the obstacles his drivers faced was just getting to the roads where salt was needed. At one point, North River Road just west of the county engineer’s office was blocked with traffic.

Eventually, a Warren Township police car provided an escort to help the salt truck get through, DiCenso said.

Paula Putnam, public information officer with the District 4 office of the Ohio Department of Transportation, which handles Trumbull and Mahoning counties, said ODOT salt trucks were out throughout Tuesday morning putting down a beet-and-salt pretreatment and other treatments in the afternoon.

runyan@vindy.com