February goes out like a lion
Storm warning only came in late afternoon
Traffic was chaos Wednesday, as the lion normally reserved to come in with March bolted the gate, arriving two days early and roaring non-stop.
The heavy, wet snow made for miserable commuting in Ottawa, with stranded OC Transpo buses and estimated total of more than 100 traffic collisions in the region. Ottawa paramedics responded to at least 31 crashes. Fortunately, none of the injuries was serious — possibly the only upside of the fact that traffic was moving so slowly.
Disabled buses were stuck on the Bank Street hill between Riverdale Avenue and the Bank Street Bridge in Ottawa South in mid-afternoon. A note from the bus agency’s general manager John Manconi said the problem was simple: too much snow and a steep climb along Bank Street that the buses just couldn’t make in the conditions.
As of 4:30 p.m., he wrote to city councillors, 60 buses had become stuck across the city and 13 had been involved in minor collisions.
Making matters worse, OC Transpo’s vaunted bus-tracking system was down, crippled by a fault in Telus equipment at City Hall, Manconi wrote. That meant the data needed to tell riders when their buses were coming — so people would know long they’d have to wait, even if it was a long time — was absent.
Nevertheless, Manconi wrote, the city’s road crews “are doing a good job of prioritizing trouble spots. Salters and road clearing vehicles are stuck with regular traffic as they try to access the reported trouble spots.”
Meanwhile, police, swamped with collision calls, urged drivers to try to slow down and to leave plenty of space between cars.
One of the more dramatic crashes occurred in the westbound lanes of Highway 417 just east of the Woodroffe overpass when a garbage truck and a small sedan collided at about 11:30 a.m. The crash tied up westbound traffic, but the injuries were minor. Gatineau police, meanwhile, had responded to 15 crashes since 11 a.m.
Downed power lines caused road closures on Hawthorne Road, between Louiseize and Leitrim Roads and on Rideau Street between Nelson and Friel Streets.
Wednesday’s snowfall was the tail end of a massive and slow-moving winter storm that moved in from the U.S. Midwest.
In anticipation of the storm, city workers began spreading salt on the roads early. To clear roads for Thursday morning, the city instituted its overnight winter parking restriction, meaning street parking was not permitted between 1 a.m. and 7 a.m. The only exception is for cars with on-street parking permits. All others will be ticketed.
The mucky weather, which included falling ice pellets around noon, lasted into the evening. The snowfall was on track to surpass the Ottawa record snowfall of 11.2 cm for Feb. 27, set in 1967.