Manitoba had a brief taste of spring, but people throughout the central and southern parts of the province woke up Friday to winter making a comeback as a storm made its way through the region.
Morning estimates from Environment and Climate Change Canada say Winnipeg received anywhere from five to 30 centimetres of snow, depending on what area of the city you’re in.
In an interesting quirk of the storm, lead forecaster Brad Vrolijk said different areas of Winnipeg woke up to vastly disparate amounts of snowfall.
“It looks like up in North Kildonan, East St. Paul, those northern parts of the city, they’ve already had up to 20-30 centimetres of snow with this system,” Vrolijk told 680 CJOB’s The Start.
“If you find yourself on the southern half of the city, it’s considerably less — as low as 5 centimetres on the very southern side of the city — so depending on where you are this morning, you’re going to have a very different amount of snow to shovel.”
Vrolijk said more snow is expected in Winnipeg on Friday, but the worst is over.
“Winnipeg is not out of the woods yet — we’ll probably see another two to five centimetres through the morning hours, and then the snow should taper off mid-day … and then we can finally close the book on this thing.”
You may see city plows and other street-clearing equipment hard at work on Friday, but the plows stayed put Thursday night — something Michael Cantor, Winnipeg’s manager of streets maintenance, says was done for a reason.
“We usually look to see what we get,” Cantor said.
“Following our policy, our regional streets, usually in these temperatures, are being salted first, and then we plow it after three centimetres. So we had to see what (fell) overnight and we made some decisions this morning.
“The conditions are not too bad, but clearing is needed.”
Cantor said more than 100 pieces of snow-clearing equipment will be out and about Friday.
While some drivers may have been frustrated by the lack of plowing Thursday night, a Winnipegger whose business includes private snow-clearing services says he understands the city needed to make a tough call.
Tim Muys of Green Blade Lawn Care told 680 CJOB’s Connecting Winnipeg that the city would have likely received backlash if it had been overzealous about street-cleaning efforts and the storm didn’t turn out to be anything major.
“It could have missed us entirely if it had just nudged a tiny bit so, to be fair to the city, they may have mobilized all that for nothing and then issued the taxpayers a bill … and I can image a lot of people wouldn’t be too happy about it,” Muys said.
“There’s always room for improvement, and this is one of those (situations) where, when it started falling, you probably could’ve got them out a little earlier … (but) hindsight’s 20/20.”
