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When he ordered a storm-stricken Deerfoot Trail closed, city police Insp. Jim Shaw wasn’t aware he was making history.

Nor did he care.

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“I didn’t know that; I didn’t think about that at all,” said Shaw of enacting the first nearly total shutdown of Calgary’s main freeway in distant memory.

“I was thinking, ‘We have too many people on Deerfoot Trail, we can’t allow it.’ That was my goal — to minimize injuries and property damage.”

Shaw was pulling a shift as duty inspector in the Real Time Operations Centre in city police headquarters on 47 Street N.E. when he glimpsed on a radar screen an ugly blast of winter weather descending swiftly on the city late Saturday morning.

Within minutes, wind-whipped pandemonium ensued along many arteries in the city, but the worst impact was on Deerfoot Trail’s northern reaches, he said.

“It originally started in the north around Beddington and it kept piling people up, who kept coming southbound,” said Shaw of the bedlam play-by-play blasting on his police radio. “People were panicking, spinning out of control.”

After the first collision around 11 a.m., the mayhem rapidly snowballed, he said, with police district sergeants down Deerfoot’s length beginning to voice alarm.

Soon enough, the notoriously icy Calf Robe Bridge became embroiled in the slippery chaos and Shaw made the call to shut down southbound Deerfoot between McKnight Boulevard and 16th Avenue.

A hurried discussion with a battalion fire chief who reported more crashes on the freeway at Southland Drive was the tipping point, said Shaw.

“He asked who has authority to close down Deerfoot, and it had progressed to the point where it was unreasonable to close down only sections,” he said.

At 12:40 p.m., Shaw made the call to shut down both directions of the city’s provincially-maintained major asphalt lifeline, an order extending from McKnight Boulevard in the north to Stoney Trail in the south.

Carmacks snow plows were already on the road doing routine winter maintenance.

For Shaw, precedent for such a move was set in Ontario, where as an officer, he’d seen a snow-lashed Highway 400 north of Toronto closed down.

Sealing off interchanges and ramps feeding Deerfoot quickly followed.

The safety of emergency crews rescuing stranded motorists and the stricken drivers themselves were the prime motivation for the decision, said Shaw.

A radio channel was set up and word sent out to other police units, “so we could put all our resources on Deerfoot,” he added.