Digging out

Though not totally cleaned up Tisdale's street cleaning crew did a remarkable job of making sure that most of the town's streets were passable this morning. This is a major piece of work because the storm yesterday filled the streets, parking lots and driveways of the town heaped with fresh snow.

The town crew were not the only ones on the job as everywhere I went this morning there were home owners, contractors and handimen out digging. There were actually teams of workers clearing some of the sidewalks in the downtown area.

With the temperature at -31ºC this morning there is good reason for hurrying up the clean up process. Low temperatures cause this kind of snow drifting to compress and turn to stone after only twenty-four hours or so and I found the stuff in our driveway that was fluffy yesterday pretty stiff this morning.

I drove up #35 north for a short ways this morning and discovered that the countryside took quite a battering from the storm. Dragon tooth snow drifts cover the fields (dragon teeth drifts are the kind of drift that forms when the wind cuts into existing drifts and produces a sawtooth effect). Most country access roads are closed with the exception of those travelled by school buses and even those look pretty questionable to me and the van this morning.

The picture above of the snow drift has an unusual pattern, that's is just caused by ice on the windshield of the van. It started nicely after being plugged in for an hour this morning but the ice on the outside will take a while to clear up. By the way, an hour is about the maximum needed to get your vehicle going, leaving it plugged in around the clock makes it handy to go and start at any moment but is wasting valuable energy. If you know you are going somewhere at a specific time plug in an hour ahead of time and save yourself a bit of money.

These pictures of downtown show the mound of snow in the middle of the street. The town crew was working further south loading that up and trucking it away so that by this afternoon it will be history.

So we have survived the first real storm of the winter. From the look of the weather pattern we can expect to see more storms like this one even though the low temperatures of this next few days are considered temporary as this is still going to be a pretty mild winter.

Remember if you are out on the road and get stuck stay with your vehicle, no need to repeat the bad news from the Lloydminister area where two people left their stranded car and attempted to walk to a nearby house only to become fatalities.