The never ending precipitation made for some very tricky driving conditions overnight in and around Montreal.
The mess started Wednesday afternoon and didn't really stop.
"A drive that usually takes five minutes, took me an hour," one motorist told CJAD 800s Aaron Rand show. The snow that fell Wednesday morning changed to freezing rain by late afternoon, covering many streets in a sheet of ice.
One CJAD 800 listener had a close call near the Cote-Vertu metro station. At about 10:00 P.M. an STM driver lost control of a bus on the ice and narrowly missed hitting the woman and her family. The bus crashed into a guard rail in front of them.
"It missed us by inches," Bev Milstein-Wohlmuth said. "It was so icy outside."
Later in the night a city truck spreading salt in Pierrefonds was unable to make a turn at Gouin Blvd. and Pilon St. The large vehicle slid off the road and crashed into a Hydro pole. The accident knocked out power to more than 2,000 Hydro-Quebec customers in the area for a couple of hours overnight.
After a night of rain, Road conditions are very slippery this morning. Bus and truck skidded off the road on Gouin boulevard near Cap-Saint-Jacques in Pierrefonds. @CTVMontreal pic.twitter.com/bvYRVwqHb8
— Cosmo Santamaria (@cosmoCTV) January 24, 2019
Transport Quebec crews dealt with more than a dozen small accidents over the course of the night, many of them were cars losing control and sliding off the road into a snowbank.
Water accumulation and minor flooding caused problems in several areas early Thursday. Highway 20 west was closed at 1st Ave. due to problems with drainage and parts of the Ville-Marie and LaFontaine tunnels were affected by minor flooding.
With the rain expected to continue through most of Thursday morning then switching to snow by the evening, conditions on the road are not expected to improve by much for at least the early morning drive.