Friday night flakes just appetizer for likely plowable snow tonight

Minnesotans, start your snowblowers.

A second blast of snow starting tonight around 10 and into Sunday could leave about 6 inches of weekend snow covering the metro area, with even deeper accumulations northeastward of Cambridge and Little Falls all the way through the Arrowhead.

A late-afternoon bout of flurries Friday led to a rash of rush hour crashes, spinouts and lane closures across the metro area.

A 24-year-old Prior Lake man died about 6 p.m. Friday when he lost control of his car and crashed head-on into another vehicle on Hwy. 12 near Delano. According to the Minnesota State Patrol, road conditions were icy. A 39-year-old Delano woman who was driving the other car and her 10-year-old daughter went to Ridgeview hospital in Waconia with injuries that were not life-threatening.

Also, slippery conditions likely caused a vehicle to slide off a Burnsville road into a small pond Friday night. About 6:30 p.m., police got a call that a vehicle had slid into a pond on the southwest corner of County Road 5 and 155th Street W. Nobody was injured.

In the metro area, snow was expected to end after midnight Friday, then resume Saturday evening, with the heaviest accumulations occurring between midnight and 8 a.m. Sunday. In between, Saturday is expected to be mostly cloudy with a high of 34.

The National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning, effective from late Saturday to late Sunday, for the north metro into northeast Minnesota, with a watch to the southeast and an advisory to the southwest. From the metro area south to the Iowa border, temperatures Sunday are expected to drop from near 30 in the morning to the low teens Sunday night, with winds gusting toward 30 miles per hour. Duluth and Iron Range areas should see less wind and temperatures in the low 20s Sunday night.

If the metro area gets the amounts of snow that have been forecast, snow parking emergencies could be called. Information and alerts are available by phone, online and through news media; Minneapolis will post snow emergencies on electronic signs above downtown streets. In Minneapolis, recorded information is available at 612-348-SNOW (7669); in St. Paul the number is 651-266-PLOW (7569).

Parking rules differ in each city. Many suburbs also have their own snow emergency parking routines. Individual cities have snow emergency parking information on their websites. Violators of snow emergency parking rules can have their cars ticketed and towed.

Bill McAuliffe • 612-673-7646