Mounds of snow raise flood fears
White stuff has to go somewhere once temperatures start to rise
Mountains of melting snow are leading to flooding fears.
City crews are ready to clear catch basins to drain pooling water if snow piled high throughout Edmonton melts quickly, says the superintendent of operations for roadway maintenance.
People who have flooding or notice problems should call 311 to have a city employee come out to check, Roland Aitchison told reporters Friday.
“There’s going to be melt,” Aitchison said. “There’s a lot of snow on the roads and there’s a lot of snow on the boulevards, so we will have some melting concerns. We’re ready for that. We work closely with our drainage counterparts so we have some contingency plans in place to deal with that when it happens.”
The city offers tips for homeowners to protect their property against damage from a rapid snow melt: Keep eavestroughs and downspouts clear and in good condition, use downspout extensions and splash pads to keep water away from the foundation and make sure the ground around the house slopes away from the walls so water can’t pool. Homeowners should not pile snow near the foundation.
Depending on where you live in the capital region, between 20 and 30 centimetres fell during Thursday’s snowstorm. Northwest of Edmonton, Westlock received the most snow — an estimated 40 centimetres — which proved a factor in a head-on crash that killed a woman and two children.
In Edmonton, heavy traffic prompted the city to temporarily shut down one of its five snow-dumping sites, the snow mountain near 184th Street and 107th Avenue. That site is normally used by both city crews and the public, such as companies clearing parking lots.
“The problem we were having is the amount of traffic that was in the site was getting to the point where it was causing some concerns for our staff and our equipment, so we diverted some of the traffic to the other snow sites so we could catch up on that site, specifically,” Aitchison said.
Snowplows cleared the busiest roads and bus routes Friday and graders bladed residential neighbourhoods. About 200 machines were working around the clock to get traffic flowing smoothly, Aitchison said.
“I think we’ll be in good shape without implementing a parking ban.”
Temperatures should remain quite cold for the next few days, although clear skies mean sunshine will melt some of the snow, said CBC Edmonton meteorologist Stephanie Barsby.
“We’ll be contending with chilly temperatures,” said Barsby, who predicts a high of about -8 C for Saturday and -4 C Sunday.
“It’s not so much the temperature, but all that sun that’s going to create some melting. It’s actually quite fortunate that temperatures are going to remain fairly cool because if they warmed up too quickly, then we could be looking at some flooding issues.”
The official snowfall amount at the international airport was 13 centimetres Thursday, Barsby said. “It was a record snowfall for that day.”
The former record for March 21 was set in 1962 with 10.9 centimetres.
The monthly total for March so far is 40.8 centimetres, Barsby said.
“We haven’t seen this much snow in the month of March since 2006 when we saw 42.6 centimetres, so that’s significant, and we’re still got nine days left in March. We could easily surpass that 2006 number.”
The heavy snow made driving treacherous, prompting the temporary closure of a section of Anthony Henday Drive and causing car pileups south of Edmonton on the QEII.
RCMP reconnected drivers Friday with vehicles that were towed from the scene of a 45-car pileup a day earlier near Leduc. That crash happened about 11:30 a.m. in the northbound lanes of the QEII near the Millet overpass, about 40 kilometres south of Edmonton.
Emergency crews responded from surrounding communities, including from Edmonton, and buses transported people away from the crash scene to community centres so they could catch rides home.
Trucks from about eight towing companies helped remove vehicles from the highway and drivers called Ponoka RCMP traffic services Friday to track down their cars.
“I’ve certainly been receiving a lot of phone calls. Literally, I’m picking up the phone and talking to person after person,” said Ponoka RCMP Const. Riley Sutherland.
The crash at the Millet turnoff triggered other crashes on the QEII, said Cpl. Colette Zazulak. In total, about 100 vehicles collided along 15 kilometres of highway, she said.
One man was injured when he got out of his vehicle after a collision and was hit and pinned under a semi. He is now in stable condition, Zazulak said.
Drivers were filling out collision reports and filing insurance claims while RCMP investigate, Zazulak said. No charges had been laid Friday afternoon.
“Then (officers are) going to need to sit down, look at them all together, analyze which vehicles were involved in which collisions, what time they happened, and try to come up with a little bit of a timeline as to how the events played out. It’s a clearly arduous task,” Zazulak said.
“As the information is pieced together, it will come to light whether any charges are warranted.”