Snow
Now I know that I have bolgged about snow to an almost ridicules extent in the past few months but like any good Brit (and any good Canadian for that matter) I can talk endlessly about the weather.
This weekend saw the arrival of Ottawa’s biggest winter storm of the season with 50cm of snow falling on Saturday night, pushing the totally snowfall for this winter well over the 4m mark. This is means that Ottawa is only 30cm short of having its snowiest winter on record.
This ridicules snowfall also means that the snow outside has now reached the height of my window and that I couldn’t get out the building on Sunday as drifts were reaching up to 8m high. Even if I could have got outside it would have been very difficult to get anywhere. Even if I didn’t get swept off my feet or buried in snow and managed to struggle my way to the bus stop there would have been no busses. Most public transport ground to a halt on Sunday as busses could no longer navigate the snow clogged roads. On campus no roads got ploughed until Monday morning so most shops and sports facilities closed as their staff couldn’t get to work. This was the pattern through out the city as snow fell faster than ploughs could move it and even when snow was being moved they have run out of places to push it.
Stories have been trickling in all week about crazy disruptions caused by this epic storm. The o-train got suck in a drift and passengers had to hike back to roads. There were hundreds of abandoned cars on unploughed streets were not being moved because the tow-trucks also got stuck and then the ploughs couldn’t clear the street. Ambulances couldn’t reach thousands of destinations and were parking on ploughed streets and snowshoeing to accidents. The police patrols had changed from cars to skidoos to allow them reach most areas of the city. All fights to and from the airport were cancelled and many others just scheduled to pass over eastern Ontario were forced to land. Therefore thousands of people were trapped in the airport and forced to spend Saturday night sleeping in the terminal. This was not the only case of people being trapped as thousands of shop and office workers elected to sleep at work rather than brave the weather home.
Despite all this mayhem and getting a little trapped I really do hope that Ottawa gets that final 30cm of snow before the spring thaw. To be in the city during its snowiest winter ever would be an exciting experience but even is this doesn’t happen I still will have experienced the snowiest winter season in 60 years.
So anther blog on snow and I hope that I have something new to talk about next week or that we will have broken that record and I’ll have more now to talk about.
