Three dead in road accident in Lapinlahti
Poor visibility caused by whirling snow brings a motorway pile-up and several minor collisions in Helsinki area
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Three people died and two were injured in the worst accident of a difficult weekend on the roads.
The crash took place on Highway 5 in Lapinlahti in Northern Savo on Friday, sometime after 8 in the evening.
According to the police, the accident happened when a car coming from the south started to swerve and collided head-on with a vehicle travelling in the opposite direction.
The driver and two passengers of the swerving car died of their injuries. According to the authorities, all three, a woman and two men, were young adults.
The driver was later said to have had her licence only a week prior to the accident.
Reportedly, a man and a woman in the other car involved in the accident did not sustain serious injuries.
Visibility at the scene was good. The stretch where the accident took place was straight and well-lit, but the road surface was slippery.
In Helsinki, flurries of snow combined with slick roads caused several collisions and fender-benders in the metropolitan area on Friday and Saturday.
The worst was a motorway pile-up involving 17 vehicles that took place on Tuusulanväylä near Tuomarinkylä early on Friday afternoon. Two individuals sustained minor injuries in the collision.
The accident was brought about by a driver who - blinded by the whirling snow - failed to see another car driving next to him he was changing lanes.
The man steered his vehicle into the side of the other car, causing it to start spinning wildly. Other cars coming from behind then collided with it one after another.
As a result, around a dozen vehicles became write-offs in short order.
The accident caused traffic jams on Tuusulanväylä as well as on the Kehä I inner ring road. Tuusulanväylä was completely closed for an hour, and thereafter during the clear-up operations only one lane was in use.
Traffic was back to normal after 16:00. The police are looking into the accident as multiple endangerings of traffic safety.
In central Helsinki it was mainly buses that were involved in collisions.
In the early evening just before 17:30 a larger bus rear-ended a smaller one on Mannerheimintie near the Helsinginkatu intersection.
Reportedly, two people sustained minor injuries.
Earlier in the afternoon two buses collided in Kamppi.
A bus hit the side of another bus, the front part of which then rammed into the wall of the Kamppi shopping mall.
Three bicycles in a bicycle rack were summarily squashed in the process. Nobody was injured.
Also, a drunk driver fleeing from the police lost control of his car and slithered off the road into the snow bank on Kehä I. He suffered minor injuries.
Conditions on Saturday and Sunday continued to provide problems for those Finnish drivers in the south of the country who have had some trouble getting to grips with the fact that winter has come, albeit rather later than anticipated.
Helsingin Sanomat
