Icy Conditions Cause Problems On Area Roads; Woman Killed In Gambrills Crash

GAMBRILLS, Md. (WJZ) --  Icy conditions are causing problems all over the area Thursday, including a death in Gambrills.

Alex DeMetrick reports due to icy road conditions on many bridges and overpasses, police and fire departments handled numerous accidents.

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Those accidents were spread over a number of counties, but it was Anne Arundel County that seemed to have the most and the most serious.

Temperatures dropped low enough to turn overnight snow into thin crusts of ice.

Getting it off cars was the easy part.  Getting into work was the hard part.

Main lines  jammed up, especially in Anne Arundel County.

"97, 50, Route 100, Route 2, 695. We have reports from all over the county of just major backups," said Justin Mulcahy, Anne Arundel County police spokesman.

The reason: ice-related accidents. At least 60 were reported to Anne Arundel County Police between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m.

Most were not serious, but one was deadly.

Around 7:45 a.m. on Waugh Chapel Road and Silver Way, 18-year-old Alexis Lewis' car apparently slid and struck a cement truck driven by Gerald Carpenter, 60, of Annapolis.

Both vehicles then struck a guardrail.

"There was a fatality, an adult female who was the operating the SUV. Preliminarily, it appears that weather conditions, road conditions I should say, was a factor," Mulcahy said.

Police say Lewis, of Crofton,  was ejected from her car and pronounced dead at the scene. Carpenter was not injured.

Because it was a fatal collision, accident investigators spent all morning collecting evidence. The road did not open until just before noon as crews attempted to remove the cement truck and reconstruct the accident.

But roads weren't the only slick spots.

Besides responding to 37 car crashes, Anne Arundel fire crews also responded to "six falls due to ice conditions, individuals that stepped out onto their sidewalks and porches in front of their houses and slipped," said Anne Arundel County Fire Department Division Chief Keith Swindle.

Swindle says 40 crews were called out for property damage and small crashes.

Treacherous conditions vanished with the ice, as the morning warmed.

Still, the timing couldn't have been worse for the morning commute, which included a 10-car pile up on Route 100.