Heavy rainfall expected to follow icy conditions
Emergency service personnel reported a number of collisions on icy roads and highways throughout Niagara during the weekend, but none resulting in serious injuries.
Following freezing rain and ice pellets that fell Saturday afternoon and into Sunday, many drivers chose to stay indoors and perhaps binge watch TV — if they had power.
Port Colborne residents were left without power for more than four hours Saturday morning as Canadian Niagara Power, on its Twitter account, reported an issue with a feed from Hydro
One.
The city also experienced another outage later in the day as the power once again failed. And Sunday morning, the company reported it was dealing with an outage in the Ridgeway area.
The two cities weren’t alone — nearly 16,000 customers in St. Catharines in the are of Geneva Street to the Welland Canal and from Lincoln Avenue and Queenston Street to Lake Ontario were without power Saturday morning. Hydro crews there worked to restore power as quickly as they could.
In Niagara-on-the-Lake, three hydro poles were reported down on Concession 6 near Line 8. The town also said there was widespread outage due to Hydro One transmission failure.
Wainfleet saw outages in parts of the township on Saturday, and Niagara Falls had areas without
power on Sunday with 2,500 customers affected.
There were no reported power outages in Welland as a weather system moved in bringing with it a drop in temperatures and ice pellets, which quickly froze on vehicles and started to accumulate on roads.
Welland said its public works crews were mobilized Sunday morning to clear roads of the ice pellets.
On its Twitter account Sunday morning, St. Catharines said 17 large trucks and two small trucks applying material to main routes and designated secondary roads. Forestry crews at the ready should the storm cause limbs or trees to come
Port Colborne public works crews were out early Sunday morning sanding all primary and secondary roads throughout the city.
Environment Canada said following an appreciable freezing rain event, a round of heavy rainfall was expected in Niagara.
“The rain may fall heavily at times with amounts likely in the 20 to 25 mm range. Some additional rainfall is likely into Monday. Total rainfall amounts for Sunday night into Monday may be in the 25 to 35-millimetre range,” the agency said in its rainfall warning.