(NECN: Brian Burnell, New Britain, Conn.) - Tuesday's snow has created a ton of headaches on the roads in Connecticut, and state police have reported dozens of motor vehicle accidents.
Around 9:30 a.m. in Lebanon, a truck loaded with 2,000 gallons of kerosene was headed down a hill on Route 16 when the driver lost control on the ice and the truck landed on its side. He was not badly hurt, but houses nearby were evacuated as a precaution. While not as flammable as gasoline, kerosene is dangerous and firefighters were taking no chances. A cleanup crew from the State Department of Energy and Environmental Protection was brought in to handle the kerosene.
"Sometimes we're forced to actually drill through the cargo tank itself to evacuate the product. It's a little riskier than trying to right the truck half full or something like that. So that's what we're doing here in this situation," Mark DiCaprio of Conn. DEEP says. "When these vehicles get into accidents, the containers themselves become compromised, and so our concern is when you try to right something like that you could have a catastrophic release."
That did not happen, and only about 50 gallons spilled.
This type of accident was repeated across Connecticut on icy roads. In Milford, a pickup truck slammed into a house after the driver unable to negotiate the curve on the slippery street. Fortunately, no one was hurt.
Conditions were more wet than white depending on where you were. In the Hartford area, trucks treated the roads, but ice was not much of a factor by mid-morning. For those with a day off, a park and a dog, it was something of a winter wonderland.
"It's very beautiful. And Rusty seems to like it an awful lot. He does. He loves the snow," Hartford resident Jen Lally says. "It does sort of look like we're in a snow globe out here. Very beautiful."
