Cold and snow bring both bad and good
As records are set, some people are winning and some are losing during this month’s unseasonably cold and snowy weather.
B.C. Hydro recorded its highest February peak hourly demand on Monday evening, mostly a result of people cranking up the heat in their homes, while dozens of others shivered and huddled together inside snow-covered tents in the Downtown Eastside’s Oppenheimer Park.
Fiona York, spokeswoman for the Carnegie Community Action Project, said there had been tents in the park since the spring of 2018, adding the current number of tents, 50, was “record-breaking for Vancouver in the wintertime.”
For B.C. Hydro, its peak demand was 10,050 megawatts on Monday evening, just shy of the all-time 10,194-megawatt record set on Jan. 3, 2017.
Carmen Hartt, meteorologist with Environment Canada, said Wednesday in Vancouver was expected to be clear and cold, with a high of 2 C. Thursday and Friday are likely to be cold and wet, with showers and flurries, and after that the cold will continue.
Hartt said February’s unseasonal weather was the result of arctic air settling across most of the continent.
The snow is caused by low-pressure systems coming from the Pacific that usually bring rain, but are running into the arctic air.
“When we compare it to climate normals, we’ve been trending cold this whole month, and in terms of snowfall the normal average over February is 6.3 centimetres. As of Tuesday morning, we are up to 22 centimetres and counting,” said Hartt, adding the February record for snowfall is 61 centimetres, set in 1949.
The weather has been a hit for local ski hills, with Julia Grant, a spokeswoman for Grouse Mountain, saying the past few days had been the best of the season for snowfall. And for school kids, of course, Tuesday was fun day as public schools throughout Metro Vancouver were closed.
Vancouver school board spokeswoman Patricia MacNeil said snow-related school closures were rare.
“The last time would have been well over a decade ago,” she said.
The decision to close schools is made at 6 a.m. and that information is spread through media reports, social media and school websites.
Users of the Expo and Millennium SkyTrain lines had a bad day of waiting on Monday, but by Tuesday capacity was up to 80 per cent.
TransLink spokesman Chris Bryan said there were usually 70 trains operating daily on the two lines.
However, on Monday they had just 35 trains operating. This was because TransLink made a “rare” decision to shut down its track intrusion alarms, which were being activated often by ice and snow, forcing trains to stop.
The system is designed to stop the trains when something falls on the track.
Bryan said TransLink then had to put drivers on the usually automated trains to manually stop trains if necessary. The problem then was finding enough staff to do that.
He said bus services had been relatively unaffected, because of the great job municipalities have been doing keeping major roads clear of snow.
In terms of snowfall the normal average over February is 6.3 centimetres ...weareupto22 centimetres and counting.