Icy roads warning scaled down to Code Yellow; 150 road incidents linked to slipperiness

Meteorological institute KNMI scaled down its weather warning for icy roads from code orange to code yellow in the last provinces at 6:08 a.m. on Monday. Code yellow still applies in the northeastern half of the country. By around 10:15 p.m. on Sunday, the Rijkswaterstaat had registered about 150 incidents on the highways due to the black ice.

The code yellow applies to Friesland, Groningen, Drenthe, Overijssel, Flevoland, Gelderland, and Limburg. Drive slowly and keep a safe following distance, the KNMI advised road users.

In the coming hours, temperatures will rise from the southwest and melt the ice away. The KNMI expects to lift the weather warning by 8:00 a.m.

The weather on Monday will be mostly cloudy, with occasional showers and a moderate wind from the southwest. Maximum temperatures will climb to around 10 degrees Celsius, according to KNMI. The rest of the week will look much the same, with temperatures rising slightly higher to about 12 or 13 degrees from Thursday.

Incidents on the roads

“It is still intense outside,” a Rijkswaterstaat spokesperson said at 10:15 p.m. on Sunday. Reported road incidents include single-vehicle crashes where no other vehicle was involved, as well as rear-end collisions. Normally, there is much less traffic on a Sunday, said the spokesperson. Rijkswaterstaat could not immediately say whether emergency services had problems reaching the accidents.

The National Police Unit said that emergency services had not yet had any difficulty reaching incidents on the road by late Sunday evening. The police received “quite a few reports” of road incidents. “We have to prioritize, then it concerns dozens of reports,” he estimated. He could not yet give exact numbers. “Injury precedes damage,” he explained the prioritization. “We also have to drive carefully to reports, so people may have to wait a little longer. From Zeeland, it is already becoming a bit quieter.”

Various police units had called on road users all evening via social media not to drive anywhere. The Rijkswaterstaat earlier also called on people to stay at home as long as a code orange weather warning applies.

The ANWB warned that inland roads and N-roads might be particularly slippery, but also roads in built-up areas. Connecting roads can be dangerous because they sometimes have sharper bends. The ANWB advised road users to drive slowly, keep a safe following distance, look far ahead of them, accelerate slowly, and stay alert, even if they have winter tires.

Gritting

By 10:00 p.m. on Sunday, Rijkswaterstaat gritters had already spread 3,545,634 kilograms of salt, covering over 40,000 kilometers of roads. That puts the counter at over 23 million kilograms of salt and more than 355,000 kilometers driven this winter. The Rijkswaterstaat uses hundreds of crates along the road and sensors on the roads to measure whether gritting is necessary.

The Rijkswaterstaat will continue spreading salt as long as the weather remains icy.