Wind plays havoc across Niagara
Port Colborne records 95 km/h wind gust
Wind was the major weather story in the southern half of the Niagara Peninsula Wednesday, with gusts reaching 95 km/h in Port Colborne
To the north, said Geoff Coulson, warning preparedness meteorologist at Environment Canada, gusts hit 89 km/h in St. Catharines.
Those winds played havoc across the region, knocking down a number of homes under construction on Brown Road near Montrose Road in Niagara Falls’ south end and knocking power out at times in municipalities including Port Colborne, Welland, Fort Erie, Niagara Falls and Lincoln and Beamsville throughout the day.
Perry Orosz, director of customer service and employee relations with Welland Hydro, said the company’s phone lines were busy with people calling in about outages, and by 11 a.m., there were already three areas with outages, affecting nearly 3,100 customers.
Canadian Niagara Power (CNP) crews were busy in Fort Erie in the Stevensville, Ridgeway and Crystal Beach areas, and the Miller Road area of Port Colborne.
Michelle Cuthbert, Port Colborne’s corporate communications officer, said
said the city shut down the road through H.H. Knoll Lakeview Park in the area of the boat ramp as high winds pushed ice and water up the road.
She said there were downed trees on Snider Road off Highway 140, at Third Concession near the highway, and Third Concession near Chippawa Road that were cleared by city crews.
City crews were also monitoring gates and pumps at both the Eagle Marsh Drain on Lakeshore Road West and at the end of
Weaver Road. Those gates prevent flooding in the city’s southwest area.
Fields and many ditches in south Niagara were full of water after 15 to 20 millimetres of rain had fallen overnight as a system moved in from Colorado, said Coulson.
“What we’re seeing now is the back end of the system … cold southwest winds driving the temperatures down as the day goes on,” he said.
Temperatures, he said, started off in the 5 to 7 Celsius range and were expected to drop to 2 C. As the temperature dropped, Coulson said Niagara experienced a “really messy mix” of rain, ice pellets and snow flurries.
A wind warning had been in place for Niagara throughout the day. Coulson said that was because the gusts had exceeded Environment Canada’s criteria of 90 km/h or more.
Coulson said Port Colborne through to Fort Erie often see some of the highest winds in the province because of the way Lake Erie is situated. Lake Erie is oriented roughly on a southwest to northeast axis and that causes the winds to funnel up the lake to the east end when storms are out of the southwest.
“The lake is a long, narrow, relatively shallow waterway … and when winds line up along the axis of the lake like this, it literally piles the water up at the Fort Erie end, while the lake levels are down in the Toledo (Ohio) area in the western end. When the winds shift or die, the water that’s been piled up sloshes back down toward Toledo.”
That sloshing effect and the winds combined to cause large chunks of ice to make it past the Niagara River ice boom in Fort Erie Wednesday and pile up along the breakwall off of Niagara Boulevard.
Normally removed by April 1, the boom remains in place due to there being more than 650 square kilometres of ice on Lake Erie.
Lou Paonessa, community relations director for the New York Power Authority, said on Wednesday that the ice boom is “working as designed” and that it does not eliminate all ice.
“Its purpose is to reduce the frequency and severity of ice runs in the Niagara River. In strong southwest wind events like today, there is a lot of water and ice pushed to the east end of the lake at the boom,” he said.
Paonessa said the boom is designed to temporarily submerge as a limited amount of ice flows over top and that in some cases, a span cable or pontoon could break loose. On Wednesday afternoon, he said he was unable to confirm if any breaks had taken place due to the storm.
— with files from The Welland Tribune’s Laura Barton, Niagara Falls Review’s Alison Langley and from Kris Dube