SNOW and ice brought carnage to parts of Huddersfield with a spate of crashes.
One of the worst hit was steep Cowrakes at Lindley where sheer good luck meant no-one was badly injured or even killed.
Eye-witness Tim Robinson watched a car come over the brow of the hill from the direction of Sainsbury’s at Salendine Nook and then lose total control.
“It was scary to see,” he said. “The car bounced from one side of the road to another like a pinball. It went with such force the airbags even deployed.”
After that car eventually ground to a halt a hatchback appeared and the young driver did exactly the same thing as the car spun around.
“Both were going far too quickly for the conditions,” said 50-year-old Tim, who used to be the highways engineer for Calderdale Council responsible for sending gritters out.
“My advice is when it’s as bad as this to simply don’t even try to go down hills. At least going uphill you have some kind of traction. I reckon at least four cars that were parked on Cowrakes were damaged after they were hit by other vehicles. It was absolute carnage.”
Tim and his 18-year-old son Sam were walking to get a burger in Lindley when they came across the chaos and spent a good hour helping out.
Tim said a terrified care worker was stuck in her car and too scared to take her foot off the brake. They helped her into a nearby car park and safety.
Another man, Darren Waite from Lindley, ran to the top of Cowrakes to stop any more traffic coming down and said some of the crashed motorists suffered from whiplash and shock.
One of the most dramatic crashes was caught on camera in Deighton after several cars had crashed into the back of one another ... and then all were hit with force by another car as yet a third vehicle could be seen sliding down the road the wrong way.
Greenhead Lane in Dalton was impassable after a VW car ploughed into a white van.
One person was slightly hurt after two crashes caused by snow on Heathy Lane in the Holmfield area of Halifax left one car on its roof.
The main snow really hit Huddersfield hard around 6pm yesterday and within an hour many roads had become gridlocked or impassable due to sheet ice.
The M62 virtually ground to a halt by 10pm but traffic just managed to keep going although a crash on the westbound carriageway near Junction 26 at Chain Bar left the second and third lanes blocked by a damaged van. All other routes across to Manchester were closed.
At 9.45pm bus company First West Yorkshire announced it was suspending all services due to the severe weather.
Holme Valley Mountain Rescue Team were called out by the Yorkshire Ambulance Service to help them get a patient with a broken leg in Marsden to hospital.
The team tweeted: “The snow presented challenging road conditions that necessitated our 4x4 capability.”
On top of all that Huddersfield firefighters had to tackle two car fires.
At 8.30pm a Vauxhall Insignia overheated on Balmoral Avenue after in Crosland Moor after it had been revved in the snow. The blaze was confined to the front of the car.
At midnight on Kaffir Road at Edgerton a Fiat 500 Abarth was found blazing and had been completely destroyed. The fire burned through the handbrake cable, sending the car careering down the road and into a hedge.
