Surprise snowstorm blankets Westman

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This article was published 25/05/2024 (677 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

An unexpected spring snowstorm hit Westman on Friday, causing several power outages in and around Brandon and causing three schools to close early.

A rainfall warning issued by Environment and Climate Change Canada was changed to a snowfall warning around 3 p.m. Friday, warning of 10 to 15 centimetres of snowfall.

When the Sun spoke with Environment Canada meteorologist Justin Shelley around 2:30 p.m., around two centimetres of snow and 26 millimetres of total precipitation had fallen on Brandon. East of Killarney, some areas had received 40 to 55 millimetres of precipitation.

Though he hadn’t been able to completely validate the information, he said it appeared that the last time Brandon had at least two centimetres of snow this late in the year was May 24, 1992.

Around 2:25 p.m., a note went out to parents and guardians of students at Meadows, Linden Lanes and Green Acres schools asking them to pick their kids up early after power went out, Brandon School Division communication co-ordinator Terri Curtis said by email.

The snow was not enough to cancel any of the division’s afternoon bus routes, though Curtis noted that some drivers might have had to take detours around some gravel roads outside of the city.

Power outages hit both the city and rural communities.

In the morning, a tree contacting power lines in Brandon’s west end caused both smoke and an outage affecting about 1,150 people.

In the early afternoon, there were outages in the Green Acres and Linden Lanes areas for which Manitoba Hydro’s online outage map listed no cause.

South of Brandon, there were outages affecting the RM of Cornwallis, Brandon Hill, the Municipality of Oakland-Wawanesa, the RM of Prairie Lakes

East of the city, there were outages around MacGregor and Long Plain First Nation.

Further north, an outage in the RM of Rosedale was said to be affecting around 242 customers.

Manitoba Hydro spokesperson Scott Powell said he didn’t know how many workers were out tackling outages on Friday, but some workers had been pulled from construction duties to assist in restoring service to customers.

“Typically when we have these higher winds and rain, and if we’re getting a little bit of wet snow combined with trees that have leafed out, you’re going to get a lot of tree contact that can cause outages of varying lengths,” Powell said.

“When they’re widespread, even if they’re individually smaller customer accounts, they do take time for our crews to respond to. Sometimes it can be a very quick restoration and other times, it can take a little longer if there’s some more significant damage caused by, say, a falling tree or line that gets damaged due to heavy wet snow.”

Powell advised people to stay away from downed or damaged power lines and equipment. For those experiencing outages, he said the best way to report them is through Manitoba Hydro’s mobile website.

“It goes automatically into our maintenance queue and it goes straight to our dispatch office so we can get crews out as quickly as possible.”

He said the best place to get updated information on the details and estimated restoration time for outages is Hydro’s online outage map.

The precipitation forced City of Brandon crews to abandon pothole patching and street sweeping efforts on Friday, said Travis Woloshen, a maintenance manager with the public works department.

“It’s just too wet to sweep that debris,” Woloshen said. “Instead of the machine picking it up, it’s just kind of smearing stuff around, so we pulled the pin on that for the day and potholing with the hot asphalt.”

Even though the forecast called for more rain on Monday, Woloshen said it didn’t look like it would be enough to prevent further street sweeping work. As for the pothole patching, he said it would depend on whether Zenith Paving decides the weather is good enough to make hot asphalt.

Shelley said the weather was a low-pressure system that developed in the High Plains area in the Dakotas in the United States, where there had recently been a lot of thunderstorm activity.

“That coupled with the developing low allowed for this significant area of precipitation to form today,” he said.

“It does look like the precipitation is going to continue through the evening and then slowly through the overnight hours start to dissipate. By tomorrow morning, the precipitation should be over, though there might be some scattered areas of precipitation.”

After Saturday, Shelley said a warmer air mass will move in and return daytime temperatures to the mid to high teens, likely warming up to the mid-20s C by the middle of the week.

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