VANCOUVER -- Residents experienced treacherous road conditions right across Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley after the latest winter wallop.
"We have approximately 2,000 kilometres that are our priority routes," said Erin Watts, street operations manager with the City of Vancouver. "We weren’t expecting quite the dump that we had in the timeframe that we had last night."
The snow started coming down shortly before 7:30 p.m. Sunday night. Emergency crews were kept busy, pulling cars out of ditches in various locations along Highway 1 while plows were out in force right across the region.
Both Vancouver and Surrey have their fleets working around the clock, but Watts said this was a challenging storm.
"It rained a lot in advance of this cold snowy weather," she said. "That means that any pre-treatment that we had on the road just gets washed off the road."
Ray Keer, the engineering operations manager with the City of Surrey, said their crews were also busy throughout the weekend clearing the roads.
"We've been on rotating shifts since last Friday when the storm began. And unfortunately depending on when the weather comes in and freezes up, it's just going to take time to deal with all the roads," he said.
CTV News cameras spotted a handful of cars spinning out as they exited the Granville Bridge to downtown Vancouver.
Residents in Vancouver worked to scrape ice and snow from their sidewalks and driveways. One person told CTV News she’d been working for three hours just to clear the stretch in front of her home.
With temperatures expected to drop again on Monday night, treacherous driving conditions are likely to persist, and Watts said the city is now preparing for "high ice concerns."
