Officials with the Wisconsin Department of Transportation said staff had to handle four times as many incidents on the highways after heavy snowfall Monday morning.
At the Traffic Operations Center in Milwaukee, they brought in extra staff to handle the incident load. According to Paul Keltner, the traffic management supervisor, they had roughly 250 incidents before noon. Normally they have about 60 by that time.
"It's very, very hectic today," Keltner said. "We got hit with a lot of snow around the morning rush hour that really had an effect on the morning rush hour traffic. Slowed speeds down, caused a lot of spin outs."
Two major incidents involved one on I-41 near Slinger and a second on I-43 near Sheboygan.
"This morning, it was bad very, very bad," said Fozia Nawaz, who lives on Milwaukee's south side. "I was going to take [my daughter] to a doctor appointment and it took me two hours to just to get to her house, that's a 20 minute drive from my house."
Keltner also said he had an extremely long commute to get to the traffic operations center Monday morning.
"Typically I'm about 8-10 minutes and today it took me 45 to get in," he said.
DOT officials recommend drivers check out www.511wi.gov before heading out to see any ongoing traffic incidents.
Be sure and try our new SNOWCAST APP! It is the "snow equivalent to STORM SHIELD" - a great new product that gives you high resolution snow forecasts for any part of the nation! It has just been introduced for iPhones, but we are working on the Android version! Just search SNOWCAST in the App Store or click here.
