Dealing with icy conditions

INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) - Before you hit the road in the morning, you'll want to get your car ready for icy conditions.

Cars outside will likely be covered in ice, and car doors and locks may be frozen shut.

De-icer will come in handy, as Thursday evening it took some people more than 20 minutes to scrape off their cars.

“Doors will freeze, locks will freeze,” said Bill Amonett with Beck Service Center. “It doesn’t take a split second to do hundreds of dollars in damage.”

He says especially with windshield wipers.

“This is going to be the most critical thing you do, to pull the wiper blades away from the windshield.”

Amonett says before you even start your car, pull those blades away from the windshield.

“If you don’t do that, and it’s iced, and you go to start it, the wipers won’t move,” said Amonett.

He says you could cause hundreds of dollars in damage from trying to move them.

If your doors and windows are iced shut in the morning, he says don’t use hot water to try to get them open. It’ll just freeze again. Anything warm, even a blow dryer, will work to open the doors.

And he says don’t forget, be careful when chipping ice off your windshield.

“You just gotta start at the edges, get it loose, and just start to gently scrape it that way. You can crack a windshield otherwise,” added Amonett.