Icy Roads and Ice Patches

We see a tremendous increase in the number of car accidents and motorcycle accidents once the cold weather hits and there's a couple reasons for that. Snow and ice on the road make the roads slick and make people have accidents that's pretty self-explanatory. However, once the weather gets below freezing, what you have is the water which normally drains and runs across the road or the pools, freezes. And now when you're driving, even if it's not snowing, you may have a big slick ice patch right in the middle of the road. What also happens with these, and they're called isolated ice patches, as soon as the weather gets back up toward the thaw point and it goes above freezing. The ice patch turns to slush or water, cars drive through it, and then the it's called tracking. The cars track and splash the puddle to the point where what is a three foot wide puddle is now 12 feet wide and across the lane. And even worse cars ride through and the tires track it down the road and you suddenly have a 100 foot long by 12 or 15 foot wide ice patch once the weather goes below freezing again. Very very dangerous!

We've handled hundreds of cases where a homeowner discharges their water from their storm drains or from a spring, right onto the side of the road, and oftentimes it spills onto the road and then what happens is the cars track it it grows it freezes. Then you have this huge ice pond right in front of somebody's property. It causes car accidents, even if it's a one-car accident they're very meritorious cases because the homeowner knows that he's discharging his water out onto a public road. You know those spots around town where water runs across the road and it starts to freeze as soon as it gets cold. There's spots that are caused by failure to maintain the road and failure of the homeowners adjacent to take care of their water.

Some people refer to isolated ice patches as black ice. All that really means is, it's a clear patch of ice and if the concrete is black or the asphalt's black, it appears to be black. So oftentimes you can't see those ice patches but once they turn to slush and you're driven through them oftentimes they are visible. So if you know somebody who has been in a car accident after encountering black ice or an ice patch, you need to call us because we will get the right investigators, the right engineers, we'll get our lawyers to the scene and we will walk the scene, drive the scene, video tape the scene. We can determine whether the condition is one that is the fault of someone or simply just snow falling.